
Cambridge : Physicist Professor Stephen Hawking is set to reveal plans to map the entire known universe at a conference held in his honour.
Prof Hawking, a cosmology professor at Cambridge University, will detail how a supercomputing centre he founded in the city will use images of radiation to create the map.
He is set to discuss the plans at the Starmus science conference – this year themed as a “tribute to Stephen Hawking” – which began on Monday in Tenerife.
The COSMOS supercomputing centre was founded in Cambridge in 1997 by a group of scientists brought together by Prof Hawking.
Professor Paul Shellard, director of the COSMOS computing centre, said that the computer would create a map of the early universe using images of radiation from the Big Bang, which have been captured by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite.
Prof Shellard told The Sunday Times: “Planck gives us an amazing picture of the early distribution of matter and how that led to the structure of the modern universe.”
The map of the universe will also be created using data from the Dark Energy Survey, which has a telescope with a 13ft diameter in Chile. It is hoped the cosmologists’ work will reveal the nature of the dark energy which is causing the universe to expand more rapidly.
The European Space Agency is set to launch a probe called Euclid in 2020, and Prof Shellard said that this would also help the Cambridge scientists create a picture of the universe. The probe is set to map 10 billion galaxies.
Prof Shellard said: “Hawking is a great theorist but he always wants to test his theories against observations. What will emerge is a 3D map of the universe with the positions of billions of galaxies.”
At the Starmus festival, Prof Hawking will also present the first ever Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.
He is set to give the gong to composer Hans Zimmer for his work creating the soundtrack to the film Interstellar.
When the new medal was unveiled, Prof Hawking said: “When I wrote A Brief Theory Of Everything, I was told nobody would want to read a hardback book about physics.
“Luckily for me that turned out not to be true. The people wanted to know, they wanted to understand.
“Science communicators put science right at the heart of daily life. Bringing science to the people brings the people to science.”
@