At Lunch ‘n Learn this week, we were treated to an excellent talk by Professor Peter Doel. Prof Doel taught us about the concept of measuring distances to an astronomical object with redshift. He told us that we want to map the positions of galaxies to understand the 95% of the universe that we still know nothing about.

Doel spoke about his time working on the DESI collab, ‘Mapping the Universe’. He and his team built a wide field optics lens system at UCL and shipped it to a telescope in Arizona. He also explained how the telescope functions, saying that it can spot galaxies up to 10 billion lightyears away! This telescope has already mapped 400,000 galaxy positions and the DESI team is aiming to find 35 million in total.

The students were enthused by the talk and asked numerous questions. Make sure to come next week for another engaging Lunch N’ Learn lecture!

Gaby da Silveira Pinheiro, Lower Sixth