
Biography
Dr Imogen Whittam is a Hintze Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she researches galaxy evolution. Imogen specialises in combining data from large surveys to understand the complex processes that govern how galaxies form and evolve with time. She is particularly interested in radio galaxies – galaxies that shoot powerful jets from the supermassive black holes at their centres.
Imogen has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and prior to moving to Oxford she spent five years in Cape Town as a postdoctoral fellow working with the MeerKAT radio telescope. She is a member of several large astronomy survey teams, including the Euclid Consortium, where she is a key member of the team characterising the point spread function of the telescope.
Imogen is passionate about science communication and spreading her love for all things space-related to as many people as possible.
Synopsis
In this talk Imogen will provide insights into the ground-breaking science that can be done with large extragalactic surveys. The Euclid telescope launched into space in 2023 and began full survey operations last year.
Euclid is creating a map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter. Imogen will describe the mission and present some of the breathtaking images collected so far. She will then outline what we can hope to learn from Euclid in the coming year.
In the second part of the talk, Imogen will compare this to recent ground-breaking survey data taken with the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. She will highlight some new science results, including revealing the secrets of supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies.