ABOUT THE BOOKS
Galaxies, by Or Graur, provides a concise introduction to the physics of galaxies and the history of their discovery. The book also describes how galaxies were used to discover dark matter and how they are used today to study dark energy and other facets of cosmology.
Galaxies is part of the The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series and was published in August 2024.
When Galaxies Were Born. The Quest for Cosmic Dawn is Richard Ellis’s firsthand account of how a pioneering generation of scientists harnessed the world’s largest telescopes to decipher the history of the universe and witness cosmic dawn, the time when starlight first bathed the cosmos and galaxies emerged from darkness.
When Galaxies were Born was published by Princeton University Press in November 2022.
ABOUT THE EVENT
Richard Ellis and Or Graur will be in conversation about their respective books, followed by Q&A with the audience.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Richard Ellis is Professor of Astrophysics at University College London. A Welshman by birth, he was an undergraduate at UCL and obtained his PhD at Oxford. He has held professorial positions at Durham, Cambridge and Oxford universities and spent 16 years at the California Institute of Technology where he was Director of the Palomar Observatory. Richard is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Australian and US National Academies of Science and was awarded the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize in 2023 for his research achievements in cosmology and galaxy evolution. A highly-cited astronomer, his book When Galaxies Were Born: The Quest for Cosmic Dawn (Princeton University) is a semi-autobiographical account of the progress over his career in studying distant galaxies and tracing cosmic history. In 2011, he won the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (its highest honour).
Or Graur is Professor at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and an Honorary Associate Professor at UCL. He studies how stars explode as supernovae or get torn apart by supermassive black holes. He is also interested in the multicultural mythology of the Milky Way. Galaxies is his second book with MIT Press, following the publication of Supernova in 2022.
