Vicky Fawcett, April 2020
The majority of the quasar population are blue at optical
wavelengths, typically due to an obscured view of the
supermassive black hole accretion disc. However, there is
a small but significant subset with redder optical-
infrared (IR) colours (coined as “red QSOs”)...
Russell Smith, April 2020
Gravitational lensing -- the deflection of light rays from
distant sources by objects along the line-of-sight -- is
an invaluable tool to learn about the distribution of mass
in the intervening galaxies...
Ian Smail, March 2020
The most actively star-forming galaxies in the Universe frequently hide their activity
behind obscuring clouds of soot-like dust. Initially formed in
the atmospheres of massive stars as they age, the dust absorbs much of
the starlight from these distant galaxies...
Rich Bielby, January 2020
When people talk about galaxies, we often think of the luminous
matter, i.e. the stars and maybe the dense clouds of gas
illuminated by stars. However much of a galaxy's baryonice mass is
contained not in the stuff we can see, but in massive clouds of
unilluminated gas. The obvious earth bound comparison here is
with icebergs: what we see is only the tip....
Ryan Cooke, January 2020
Models of quantum gravity predict that the very structure of
spacetime on length scales comparable to the Planck length,
l
P = 1.6 x 10
-35 m, is `frothy' or `foamy' - spacetime should
contain `bubbles' of uncertainty. The basic idea is that
distance measurements come with some intrinsic uncertainty, and
this uncertainty becomes magnified over very large distances.....
Ryan Cooke, December 2019
CEA astronomers have published a paper providing some of the
groundwork that will allow us to work towards a direct
measurement of the expansion rate of the Universe. Our current
measurements of the expansion of the Universe are all indirect,
which means that these measurements depend on a model to
infer the expansion rate....
