Furthering our understanding of our Universe

Probing the Universe’s earliest moments

Durham is among the world’s leading universities for astronomy, cosmology, and space science, and that work is only gaining pace.

Professor Ryan Cooke has been awarded a £5.6 million Royal Society fellowship to investigate the first moments after the Big Bang. He will lead a project providing the earliest view of what the Universe is made of, and search for physics that might be missing from our current understanding of the Universe.

Arise, Sir Carlos

That announcement came just a few weeks after our own Professor Carlos Frenk’s lifelong contribution to astrophysics and cosmology was recognised by King Charles III, in the form of a knighthood.

Sir Carlos is one of the originators of the Cold Dark Matter theory for the formation of the structure of the Universe, and an inspiration for researchers worldwide.

Earliest known signs of galaxy-building

Using observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, PhD student Zoe le Conte and colleagues discovered the earliest known evidence of a galaxy being shaped from the inside out – revealing that key processes in galaxy evolution were already under way when the Universe was still young.

The research shows that a distant galaxy, seen as it was more than nine billion years ago, already contains a dense, star-forming structure at its centre known as a nuclear disc.

Until now, nuclear discs had only been found in nearby, fully developed galaxies. Finding one so far back in time provides direct proof that galaxies were forming complex internal structures much earlier than previously thought.

Cosmic gymnastics

Meanwhile, PhD student Kirill Batrakov and colleagues have found that our own Milky Way galaxy may have undergone some cosmic gymnastics during its history, with a dramatic ‘disc flip’.

Using supercomputer simulations of galaxies like the Milky Way, the researchers found that galaxies with slowly rotating stellar haloes are more likely to have experienced a major ‘disc flip’, where the galaxy’s disc changed its orientation by more than 90 degrees.