Mapping the universe – how to capture all galaxies

Every time we look up at the night sky, we are looking into the past—the light from distant galaxies travels for billions of years before reaching our telescopes. Yet the traditional search for individual galaxies shows us only the tip of the iceberg: most galaxies—the small and faint ones—remain invisible.

At this Café & Kosmos evening, Maja Lujan Niemeyer from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics will explain how the new method of line-intensity mapping captures the light of all cosmic objects and what we can learn from this about the properties of distant galaxies and the composition of the universe.