Speaker's Night: Two Galaxies to Rule Them All

George Conidis, PhD Candidate in Physics & Astronomy, York University

Our observable Universe hosts hundreds of billions of galaxies distributed unevenly in a sponge-like configuration known as the Cosmic Web. The web can be classified into four distinct groups: voids (empty regions with no/few galaxies), walls/sheets, filaments, and nodes/clusters. These structures are seeded to grow from physical processes at the earliest times in the Universe. Thus, internal to each void, sheet, filament, and node, there is embedded information about how the adolescent Universe behaved. One of the primordial signatures embedded in large scale structure is the organization of a member galaxy's orientation to their host Cosmic Web structure. Our host galaxy, the Milky Way, lives in a sheet of galaxies known as the Local Sheet. As it turns out, the Milky Way and its companion the Andromeda galaxy are the peculiar culprits behind bullying their neighbours into misalignment with the sheet and theoretical predictions.

George Conidis was recently presented with the Mitacs Award for Outstanding Innovation for research that includes discovering 174 galactic neighbourhoods that mirror our own:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/11/24/toronto-innovation-award-winner-talks-galaxies-existentialism-and-life-on-mars.html

Who can attend: Everyone including non-members
Fee: Free
Reservation not needed
Location: North York Civic Centre, 5100 Yonge Street, Toronto ON  M2N 5V7
Meeting Room: Council Chambers