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| Spreker | Prof. dr. F. Fraternali (RUG) |
| Titel | From gas to galaxies: a 14 billion year journey |
| Datum/tijd | dinsdag 20 april 2021 om 20:00u |
| Taal lezing | Engels |
| Terugkijken | De lezing kan online teruggekeken worden via YouTube |
Samenvatting
At the beginning of time, all the ordinary matter in the Universe was in the form of a very simple gas made of only hydrogen and helium. If we look around us today, we see, instead, an incredibly heterogenous cosmos made of planets, stars, galaxies and a multitude of complex chemical elements. Furthermore, stars are glowing in very different colours, sizes and magnitudes, while galaxies, which are collections of myriads of stars and gas, also display a remarkable variety. Some of them are beautiful spirals like our own Milky Way, others are much larger and of elliptical shape, while the majority of them are very small and we call them dwarf galaxies. Some galaxies have large amounts of gas, which they use to actively form stars today, while others have done it all in the past and are, since a long time, resting from the exhausting labour of star formation. How did all this happen?
In this lecture, Fraternali will reconstruct our current understanding of the journey that brought us from primordial gas to present-day galaxies. A major character of this journey, together with the gas, will be the mysterious dark matter, of which we still know very little, despite this being the prevalent matter component in the Universe. The origins of our world, everything around us and even ourselves lie in the complex interplay between dark matter and gas.