Chris Lintott’s Universe

I’m currently in a talk by Richard Ellis of Caltech as part of this Imperial college organised conference. He’s expected to announce the discovery of the most distant objects known. Currently he’s arguing that many stars, some of them old are in place by a redshift of 6, the most distant epoch we’ve seen in detail to date.

Now talking about work by graduate student Dan Spark to look for objects at a redshift of 10. First, look for galaxy clusters and look for faint things within them, in the hope that you’ll see distant objects which have been magnified by their light’s passage through the foreground cluster.

…they found lots of faint candidates. Now they have to show that the emission is really from a galaxy at that distance…Oh, very nice. As well as magnifying the galaxies, the lensing by the foreground cluster moves the position of the galaxy, and this depends on distance. Using this fact and lots more observing time they can attempt to rule out other possibilities. This distance does depend, for now, on the detection of a single spectral line, however.

Here’s the image

Is it surprising that so many were seen? Work with Avi Loeb (a theorist) seems to show that there are about 2-3 times more of these than predicted, but can make the star formation more efficient to solve this problem. And that seems to be it - I hope it’s true so I can say I was here, but it would be nice (As Richard said) to have a little more confirmation.

It’s not every day you get asked to spend £250 million, but that’s what we’ll be trying to do in a debate at Science Oxford next Wednesday. I’ll be trying to persuade the audience to back my idea of how to spend an extra quarter of a billion pounds per year on UK space exploration. Enjoying stirring as I do, I’ll be arguing that the money would be better spent on ground based astronomy.

If you’d like to come along and vote for me take part in the debate then tickets are still available via the link above.

I’ll be giving a free public talk at Green College in Oxford tomorrow night. It starts at 6.30, and the title is

Who, what and when? : Progress in the BIG questions in astronomy.

You’re welcome to reserve a seat via the link above, or just come along on the night.

I’ll also be co-host of Bill Heine’s Radio Oxford show tomorrow evening, from 4 until about 5.30. You can listen online via the above link; I’m normally extremely nervous about radio, so we’ll see how it goes.