From burnt toast to the Big Bang – how galaxies at the beginning of time affect your breakfast

In this talk Rebecca will give a tour of the early universe from the Big Bang to the formation of thefirststars and galaxies. You will travel together through the ‘dark ages’, and contemplate what auniverse without stars would look like. Rebecca will show you images of the most distant galaxiesknown and try to convince you that they really do matter for your breakfast.

Rebecca Bowler is an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow studying the formation of galaxies after the BigBang at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester. Previously, she was a research fellow at the University of Oxford and in 2021 she won the Henry Moseley medal and prize from the Institute of Physics for her “exceptional contributions to the observational study of the first galaxies in the Universe”. She works to understand how galaxies form and evolve using observations from telescopes around the world and in space, including the Hubble and James Webb SpaceTelescopes