Every time someone looks up at the night sky, they are seeing less than 5 percent of what is actually there. The rest is dark matter and dark energy—invisible substances that govern how the universe expands and how galaxies form, yet remain almost entirely mysterious. This research programme at Durham University aims to explain how the universe evolved from a nearly uniform soup of particles just after the Big Bang into the vast cosmic web of galaxies, clusters, and black holes we see today. The team will combine theoretical models with observations from ground-based telescopes and space satellites to test whether our current "standard model" of the universe holds up. This is fundamental science: there is no immediate practical application. But understanding dark matter and dark energy could one day reshape physics in the same way that studying the atom led to electronics and medical imaging. For now, the payoff is a clearer answer to a question humans have asked since they first looked up: where did all this come from?
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By the nature of the questions it addresses, Astronomy attracts the imagination of the public to an extent that only very few other branches of science can match. It is immediately accessible to every human by simply gazing up into the night sky to look at the stars and the Moon. This has provoked questions about the origins of the Earth, stars and our Solar System, as well as the origins of the Universe since the dawn of civilisation. The past twenty years have seen the emergence of a standard model in Astronomy for the constituents of our Universe, as well as for the origin and evolution of all structure within it. According to this model, we live in a universe where at least two thirds of all mass-energy is now in the form of a dark energy field which is causing the Universe to expand at an ever increasing rate. About a quarter is in dark matter, most probably a new weakly interacting elementary particle yet to be detected on Earth. Only the remaining 5 percent is ordinary, or baryonic, matter of which at the present-day only about a tenth is in stars and the planets such as the Earth and the rest resides mostly as gas in the space between galaxies. The structures formed by dark and baryonic matter were seeded by quantum fluctuations imprinted in the density field of the Universe at the earliest instants of the Big Bang. These produced weak sound waves in the near-uniform primordial plasma that left observable imprints on the heat left over from the Big Bang, emitted when the Universe was only 400,000 years old. These tiny ripples grew into the full richness of structures we see around us in the Universe today: galaxies, groups, clusters and larger-scale structures. It is this transformation from a near-uniform primordial soup to a cosmic web of structure that is the focus of our proposal. Our programme knits together cutting-edge theoretical research into the earliest phases of the Universe with theoretical and observational projects to determine the formation and evolution of structure in the Universe and to confront the predictions of our models with our latest observational results, while exploiting instrumentation developments being pursued in Durham. We will focus on the evolution of galaxies back to the earliest times in the Universe and the influence which their environment has had on their properties. We will investigate the formation and evolution of black holes and their role in determining the structure and properties of galaxies and larger scale structures, using the latest instruments on ground-based observatories and Earth-orbiting satellites and theoretical models.
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