Public lecture by Dr Joseph Caruana
22 August at 19:30hrs at Stella Maris College, Gzira.
The concept of time travel is a staple of many science fiction stories. However, we do indeed have the ability to look back in time whenever we turn our glance towards the skies. Distances to stars and galaxies are so vast that light takes thousands, millions and billions of years to reach us – the light from these objects started its journey a long time ago, and holds precious clues about the universe’s past. Over the years, astronomers have pushed the limits ever farther, bringing into view infant galaxies whose light travelled about 13 billion light years across the cosmos. This talk will focus on some of the recent discoveries made in this exciting field, and how they are shaping our view of the universe’s early days. What are the tools of the trade? How are these distant objects identified? And what do they tell us about the universe’s history?
These questions and more will be explored in this talk. Access to the lecture room is through Emmanuel Drive via E. Giordano Street. Parking within the college grounds.
Joseph Caruana studied physics and mathematics at the University of Malta and read for a doctorate in astrophysics at the University of Oxford, where he tutored general relativity and cosmology, and together with colleagues discovered some of the farthest galaxies in the Universe. Presently, he lives in Berlin and conducts astrophysics research at the Leibniz Institut für Astrophysik (AIP) in Potsdam, where he is a member of a European consortium of research institutes involved with MUSE, a state-of-the-art imager and spectrograph recently installed on the Very Large Telescope in Chile.