Nominator's project description
| The most barren regions of the Universe are the vast expanses between the galaxies, known as the intergalactic medium. Averaging just one lonely atom per cubic meter, this primordial gas left over from the Big Bang encodes fundamental information about our Universe’s history. Intergalactic atoms are observable only indirectly, via their selective absorption of light traveling to Earth from distant, hyper-luminous galaxies known as quasars. Joseph Hennawi pioneered a method for finding pairs of quasars, right next to each other on the sky. He showed how these extremely rare configurations can be used to make unprecedented measurements of the small-scale structure and physical properties of intergalactic gas. Hennawi observes quasar pairs using the largest telescopes in the world; by comparing his data to supercomputer simulations of cosmic evolution, he will resolve key questions about the evolution of the Universe and shed light on how galaxies, and ultimately stars and planets, formed. |
