Overview

⏱️Schedule:  Doors 19:30 → Talk 20:00→ Q&A → Mingle

What did the Universe look like when it was only a few billion years old? In this talk, we’ll travel roughly 11 billion years into the past to explore galaxies that existed just 2–4 billion years after the Big Bang. It’s remarkable that these galaxies had already evolved so much in such a young Universe — and even more remarkable that we can observe them today.

We’ll look at how astronomers find these distant galaxies using telescopes on Earth and in space, and how the expansion of the Universe actually helps make their ancient light detectable. We’ll explore what these galaxies look like, how spectroscopy allows us to uncover their chemical makeup and physical properties, and what we can learn from studying them individually.

Finally, we’ll zoom out from individual galaxies to the Universe as a whole. By studying how these distant galaxies are distributed across space, astronomers can investigate one of the biggest mysteries in modern cosmology: dark energy, the phenomenon driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

What you'll discover

• Galaxies in the early Universe

• How we observe 11-billion-year-old light

• Images, spectra and what they reveal

• How galaxies evolved

• What galaxies can tell us about dark energy

Speaker

Dr. Emily McLinden

Astrophysicist & Machine Learning Engineer

Emily McLinden has a doctorate in Astrophysics from Arizona State University, specializing in observational astronomy and the characteristics of galaxies in the early universe.  She was a HETDEX (Hobby Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment) postdoctoral fellow and research associate at the University of Texas at Austin, before pivoting to a career in Machine Learning Engineering and Software Engineering in San Francisco, CA. She currently lives in Valencia with her wife and two daughters.

Location