100 years ago this year, Edwin Hubble published the first conclusive evidence that there were galaxies beyond the Milky Way. This lecture, using new results from our latest space telescopes and ground-based instruments, surveyed the diversity of systems that we’ve found since, from giant and beautiful spirals to mysterious Little Red Dots.
Extra reading
Hubble’s astonishing 1926 paper is available here: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1926ApJ….64..321H/abstract
Richard Ellis’ recent memoir: ‘When Galaxies Were Born: The Quest for Cosmic Dawn’ (Princeton University Press, 2022)
Schmidt’s early quasar spectrum is: Schmidt, ‘3C 273 : A Star-Like Object with Large Red-Shift’, 1963, Nature, 197, 4872 https://www.nature.com/articles/1971040a0
Gunn on fuzzy quasars: Gunn, ‘On the Distances of the Quasi-Stellar Objects’, 1971, Astrophysical Journal, 164, L113
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1971ApJ…164L.113G/abstract
A detailed description of the history of quasar science is given by Shields, ‘A Brief History of AGN’, 1999, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9903401
The Little Red Dot literature is changing quickly. This is a complete set of papers with ‘Little Red Dot’ in the abstract: https://tinyurl.com/LRDPapers
An early LRD paper was Matthee et al., 2024, ‘Little Red Dots: An Abundant Population of Faint Active Galactic Nuclei at z ∼ 5 Revealed by the EIGER and FRESCO JWST Surveys’, Astrophysical Journal, 963, 2, 129
A decent overview of spectroscopy which confirms these are distant sources is in Greene et al., ‘UNCOVER Spectroscopy Confirms the Surprising Ubiquity of Active Galactic Nuclei in Red Sources at z > 5’, 2024, Astrophysical Journal, 694, 1, 39
‘https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024ApJ…964…39G/abstract
Recent summary of LRD properties: Barro et al., 2025, arXiv: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv251215853B/abstract
Inayoshi & Maiolino, ‘Extremely Dense Gas around Little Red Dots and High-redshift Active Galactic Nuclei: A Nonstellar Origin of the Balmer Break and Absorption Features’, 2024, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 980, 2, L27 https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.07805
The theory of rapid black hole growth is given in Jeon et al. ‘The Emerging Black Hole Mass Function in the High-Redshift Universe’, 2025, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 988, 1, 110 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14703
‘Little Red as Late-stage Quasi-stars’, Begelman & Dexter, https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09085
Part of:
The State of Our Universe
This event was on Wed, 18 Mar 2026
Astronomy
Science
Physics
Professor Chris Lintott
• Gresham Professor of Astronomy (2023-)
Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.
Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He was the founder of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, ‘The Crowd and the Cosmos’. His latest book is ‘Our Accidental Universe’.
Professor Lintott is best known for presenting the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max. He can often be found at the helm of Oxford’s science comedy night, ‘Huh, That’s Funny’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lintott
https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/lintott
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/4jgzzH6CBH7b5K0qblb73nZ/professor-chris-lintott
helen the hare 