Mapping the Universe

We live in a 13.7 billion year-old Universe populated by several trillion galaxies spanning billions of light years of space and time. Yet merely two hundred years ago, humanity did not know of this Universe outside of the Solar System. K.G. Lee will tell the story of how astronomers came to discover the true scale of the Cosmos, from Herschel’s attempts at mapping the Milky Way, to the discovery that the Milky Way is itself merely an ‘island Universe’ among many others, to the latest efforts at charting the three-dimensional structure of the ‘cosmic web’: the grandest structures in the Universe stretching over millions of light years.

Speaker: Dr. K. G Lee, UC Berkeley