"Aliens" is not the answer! with Professor Matthew Colless – Sun 1st Oct

When?

Sunday October 1st, 2017 – doors open at 9am for a 10:00 am (tickets $5 - all sale proceeds to the Coonabarabran Hospital Palliative Care Unit)

Where?

Coonabarabran Bowling Club

Who? Professor Matthew Colless

Professor Matthew Colless is Director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) at the Australian National University (ANU). He was for nine years previously the Director of the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO), Australia's national optical observatory. He obtained his BSc at Sydney, his PhD at Cambridge, and has held positions at Durham, Kitt Peak and Cambridge as well as at AAO and ANU. His research uses large redshift and peculiar velocity surveys of galaxies to understand their evolution and the large-scale structures they form, and to measure cosmological parameters. Prof. Colless led the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, which provided the first precise measurements of the total density of matter in the universe and established the amounts of dark matter, baryons and neutrinos. He also led the 6dF Galaxy Survey that mapped the motions as well as the positions of galaxies. He has played leading roles in the WiggleZ survey, which probed the nature of the mysterious 'dark energy,' and the GAMA survey, which elucidates the formation and mass assembly of galaxies. He is now leading the Taipan survey that aims to obtain more than one million redshifts and more than 50,000 distances and velocities for nearby galaxies, and measure the Hubble constant with 1% precision. Prof. Colless is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an ISI Citation Laureate, a former Vice-President of the International Astronomical Union, and the ANU’s Founder representative for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) project, a next-generation 25-metre optical telescope.

What is the Subject?

"Aliens" is not the answer!

There's a lot of weird stuff happening in the universe, weirder that we could have ever imagined. Every now and again we find something really weird, something that looks like aliens are at work! But what is really happening?  Professor Matthew Colless is going to try and explain what's really going on.