Trinity Hall Spotlights: Space
After a year of extraordinary global politics and some fascinating Trinity Hall Spotlights: Politics events, in 2025 we looked further afield.
Trinity Hall Spotlights: Space brought insights into the latest research into cosmology and physics which is helping us understand more about what lies beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
In 2025, the Hubble Space Telescope celebrates 35 years since its launch. Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021 is the largest telescope in space, and sees beyond Hubble in both space and time. Theoretical physics and the latest developments in computer science, statistics and data analysis, combined with the evidence from these and other extraordinary telescopes, mean our understanding of space has been transformed in recent years.
How are cosmologists working to understand the origins of the universe, what do we understand about planets in other solar systems? How has historical depiction of the heavenly skies changed over the centuries? And to remind us that politics gets everywhere, we’ll hear the latest thinking on space as a potential battleground.
Through different academic perspectives, lectures and discussions, we hope this series will leave you awe-struck, excited and better informed about these areas of knowledge, fascinating for their own sake and for how they help us reflect on our own place in the universe.
Previous event
New Perspectives on the Universe
As experts in planetary science, cosmology, and the geopolitics of space, Professor Michael Hobson, Thom Colledge (2024) and Dr Amy Bonsor discussed the origins of planets and the materials that shape them, the actors in space and how this impacts the rules in space, and the physical expansion of human activity into new areas of space geography.