What was the past of the universe like, and how will it change in the future?

How have the objects in the universe evolved throughout the history of the universe?

How could super-massive black holes become super-massive?

We aim to understand the past and the future of the universe by answering the above questions through observational studies. Astronomers often say, “Astronomy is like a time-machine”, since the speed of the light is finite, and the farther the objects are, the time it takes for the light to reach to us is longer — that is, we are looking at the past of the universe when we observe objects far away. Galaxies and quasars are now identified out to 13 billion years ago, enabling us to peek at the very early history of the universe. We use observational facilities throughout the world to detect these distant objects and reconstruct the past history of the universe as an attempt to test the existing theories of galaxy formation.

There are many interesting distant objects such as quasars that are powered by super-massive black holes at their centers, proto-cluster of galaxies and galaxies in the early universe, massive elliptical galaxies that contain the past star formation and merging history of galaxies, objects such as supernovae and gamma-ray bursts that momentarily shine much brighter than billions of galaxies when massive stars die, and gravitational lens system that have been predicted by the Einstein’s theory of the general relativity. These are all subjects of our study. This field of observational cosmology will have a bright future with new, large facilities becoming available for Korean astronomers, such as the Giant Magellan Telescoppe, ALMA, and a large space telescope (e.g., SPICA). For more information on our research, please see the homepage of the Center of the Exploration of the Origin of the Universe (CEOU) at http://ceou.snu.ac.kr

[Homepage] https://astro.snu.ac.kr/~mim/