Date/Time: Thursday 22 October 2020, 17:30 - 18:15

30th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope

Hosted by Professor Sally Shortall, with introduction from Professor Phillip Wright

Cosmology addresses some of the most fundamental questions in science. How did our universe begin? What is it made of? How did galaxies form? In the past few decades, great progress has been made towards finding answers. While a coherent picture of cosmic evolution, going back to a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, is beginning to emerge, fundamental issues – like the identity of the dark matter and the nature of the dark energy – remain unresolved.

Biography:

Carlos Frenk earned a degree in Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1976. He then went to Cambridge, where he read Part III of the Mathematical Tripos in 1977 and received a Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1981. In the 1980s, Frenk was part of a collaboration—with Marc Davis, George Efstathiou, and Simon White—that established the validity of the "cold dark matter" theory for the formation of galaxies and other cosmic structures, now the accepted interpretation in cosmology. In 2001 Frenk became the founding director of Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, where he has continued to specialize in large supercomputer simulations of the formation history of the universe. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004. In recent years Frenk has been using computer simulations to explore the cold dark matter model in the previously inaccessible regime of the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies.

Live Q&A:

The lecture will be followed by a live Q&A with the speaker. You can submit a question in advance by sending an email to public.lectures@ncl.ac.uk or during the event using YouTube Live Chat or via Twitter @InsightsNCL.

This event will be hosted on YouTube, registration is not required.