People can live for a hundred years; stars can live for billions of years. Both have interesting lives that we should learn from. If we zoom-out and consider a whole life it tells a story, but if we zoom-in on the special moments it can be just as instructive. Jason Hessels will talk about how we use radio telescopes to scan the skies in search of short-duration signals that teach us about the extremes of the Universe. Measurements of pulsars, the Universe's near-perfect clocks, have allowed us to test Einstein's theory of gravity and the nature of ultra-dense matter. The fast radio bursts (FRBs) we see from other galaxies provide a new way to illuminate the otherwise invisible matter between stars and galaxies. The Universe looks very different when we zoom-in on these brief moments, but together these events help us understand the grander story that plays out on long timescales. The same is true in our own lives.

Prof. J.W.T. Hessels, professor of Observational High-Energy Astrophysics: Unstuck in time in a ticking cosmos.

You can watch this inaugural lecture here.