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The galaxies (collections of stars) I am looking for are over 10^22 m away, that’s a 1 with 22 zeroes after it or 15 million times the size of our galaxy and our galaxy is 150 million million times the size of a football pitch! So finding these galaxies is no easy task, but the advantage to looking this far away is that we are also looking back in time – in fact 12 billion years back. As the speed of light is fixed, it takes time for the light from these galaxies to travel to us and so when we finally see the light it’s the light from billions of years ago. Confused? Think about a man running with a message from London to Bristol. When he gets to Bristol the message will be old, it’ll tell us about what happened when he left London a day ago. It’s the same idea, the light is ‘old’ when it gets to us and carries important information about what happened all that time ago.

So to summarise, my work is searching for clusters (or groups) of these very distant galaxies to try and work out how galaxies formed in the first place.

Coffee time is an important time, not only do the group get together for some caffeine  and a chat (and cake on Fridays) but you can ask everyone about the problems your having and see if anyone can help. I have a weekly meeting with my supervisor (basically my boss) on Mondays. We also have a weekly seminar where an external speaker will come and talk and his/her work for an hour.