Presented by Professor Thomas Collett
Thursday, 24th April 2025 @ 7.30pm
Venue: The Forum, Barrow in Furness
BDAE Press Release: Our Universe Under a Magnifying Glass
Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that light rays are bent when they travel past a massive object. In this talk, we will explore tests of this prediction and view some of the spectacular consequences of light bending: gravitational lenses. We will look at newly released images from the Euclid space telescope and discuss how machine learning and citizen scientists combined to sift out hundreds of these ultra rare events buried in Euclid’s first million images. These gravitational lenses let us directly measure where the mass is in the Universe, and the results imply that the Universe is mostly made of exotic substances called dark matter and dark energy which are nothing like the everyday matter we interact with on Earth.
The lecture will be given by Thomas Collett, who is Professor of bg Astrophysics and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth. Thomas graduated from Oxford University and undertook his PhD at Cambridge University. He joined University of Portsmouth in 2016 as a post-doctoral research fellow. His research is being funded by the Royal Astronomical Society, University of Portsmouth, Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Royal Society.
