To space!

Our current theories are extremely successful, though they leave many questions unanswered. Why is there more matter than antimatter? What is dark matter and dark energy, and do they really exist? This talk will explore these questions, and how we attempt to answer them.

We all know "in space, no-one can hear you scream". In truth, space is full of the sounds of "gravitational waves" as black holes and neutron stars collide. Cullan will describe how we can hear these, and what they tell us about these mysterious objects.

Distant supermassive black holes at the core of distant galaxies appear as faint pin-pricks of light. For the brightest of these, we can use the clever trick of “reverberation mapping”, tracking the time that light takes to echo around the galactic nucleus, to measure the masses of these ancient objects far into the cosmic past.