Alex Clarke has just submitted his PhD at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. His research focusses on using radio telescopes (like LOFAR and the GMRT) to image some of the largest structures in the universe, such as radio galaxies and galaxy clusters.

You’ll be familiar with the sparkle of the night sky from the stars in our own galaxy (the Milky Way), however, if your eyes could see light at longer wavelengths (radio waves), the picture would be very different. In this talk, he will show you that the sparkle of the radio sky is primarily from other galaxies (not stars!). He’ll be showing some radio images of a brand new object we’ve discovered, a giant radio galaxy, which is a staggering 4 million light years wide. If your eyes could see radio waves, it would appear larger than the full moon on the sky, despite being 800 million light years away from us!