Black Holes seem to have a bad press that is largely undeserved. The lecture will explain what Black Holes are, how we can discover them even through they cannot be seen and how Stephen Hawking has shown that they are not totally black!
The Voyager spacecraft that toured through the giant planets of the Solar System, Jupiter's Galileo orbiter and the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan have given us wonderful views of these most beautiful planets and shown us, in Titan, a world that is surprisingly like our Earth - but at - 180° Celcius!
There are many things that we do not understand about our Universe. This lecture will discuss some of the most perplexing of these and survey the instruments that are now being built and planned to help us fathom its mysteries.
A look at the most violent events that occur in our Universe, from supernovae and hypernovae to the cause of gamma ray bursts and what was the biggest explosion of all - the Big Bang origin of the Universe itself.
The lecture will consider the legacy of both Edwin Hubble and the Space Telescope that bears his name - from Hubble's discovery of the expanding universe to the observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope that have, over the last two decades, given us new insights into our Universe.
An overview of the development of cosmology over the last 100 years from the Big Bang models of the Universe to the astounding revelation of recent years in that we have no real understanding of 96% of its content! Or even that our Universe could just be one small part of a Multiverse that extends beyond our imagination!