The 5th Annual Dan MacLennan Memorial Lecture in Astronomy

Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas the Reveal the Cosmos

With Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan, Yale University

Our cosmic view has been rapidly evolving. Until 1914, we believed that we were unique and alone in the universe. In addition to demonstrating the existence of other galaxies, in the 1920s the astronomer Edwin Hubble also discovered that our cosmos was in motion. Since then we have been rapidly uncovering many other features of our cosmos—the existence of dark matter, black holes, dark energy, extra-solar planets—that have fundamentally transformed our current understanding of the cosmos. Dr. Natarajan will focus on two of these radical ideas, dark matter and black holes, and examine how despite being deeply contested, they were eventually accepted. Mapping the seen and the unseen elements in the universe continues to help us refine our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it.