In the ordinary Universe stars shine because they are hot. This is the Universe we see with our eyes or with normal telescopes. But there is also an extraordinary Universe, where exotic objects act as Nature's own particle accelerators, and produce radiation with incredible energies. These objects include nearby supernova remnants, and supermassive black holes at the cores of distant galaxies. In this talk Mark Lang will describe the work of the international VERITAS collaboration which operates an array of special telescopes to detect very high energy gamma-rays. He will discuss the latest exciting discoveries.

ABOUT THE LECTURER

Mark Lang teaches physics and astronomy at the National University of Ireland Galway. He carried out his PhD research at University College Dublin and the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and has been a visiting scientist at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona for over twenty years. He was a member of the Whipple gamma-ray collaboration which pioneered the imaging atmospheric Cherenkov technique for detecting astrophysical gamma-rays and is now a member of the VERITAS gamma-ray astronomy project. He is currently Head of the School of Physics in Galway.