Welcome back to another episode of Beyond the Patterns.

Today I have the great pleasure of introducing an astrophysicist.

Professor Manami Sasaki studied physics at the Rubeck-Karls-Universität Heidelberg after

working as a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in

Garching where she studied the X-ray source population in the largest satellite galaxies

of the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds.

She obtained a degree of Dr. Rehanat in astronomy at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.

She continued her research in astronomy and astrophysics as a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian

Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, USA and as an Emmy-Noether-Unior research group

leader at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen before she became a professor for

multi-wavelength astronomy at FAU.

It's really a great pleasure to have you here, Manami, and today she will present a

talk entitled Cosmic Structures.

So Manami, thank you for sharing this with us, and the stage is yours.

Thank you.

So thank you for the introduction.

Hello everyone, my name is Sasaki.

As Andrea said, I'm a professor for multi-wavelength astronomy at the Karl-Riemann Observatory,

which is in Bamberg, another name of a city that you hear now.

So this belongs to the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Some of you might know it if you had astronomy as your name, Fach, because then you might

have done the astrophysics lab at the observatory that you see here.

So that's the Astronomy Institute of our university.

And that's where my office also is located, and typically for lectures I would be in Erlangen

usually if there is no COVID.

So today I would like to talk about cosmic structures, which means like structures in

everywhere in the universe, and I picked three of the major topics.

To do so, I would like to start by showing you this image.

That's actually something that you can also find on Wikipedia if you look for cosmic evolution,

the evolution of the universe, because that's what's showing.

So in the beginning, the universe, we believe it started with a Big Bang, that's like something

that there were fluctuations in something, which was a singularity, and then quickly

expanded.

That's why you see this inflation.

And then the universe got a size that then enveloped into something that we know as the

university now.

And this is here, that's where it starts.

So this is the point to which we can look back in the entire universe after this part,

we don't know what's going on.

So this is what you might have also heard about already, it's the cosmic microwave

background, and I'll come back to that later.

And after that, the universe became dark, so it's cooling after this initial expansion,

and then it continues expanding.

But then at some point, since there were density fluctuations in the universe, out of the

largest density fluctuations, the first stars formed.

And what these stars did by their light, the photons that they emitted, they then started

ionizing the environment.

So everything was only atoms, and now you have ions.

And this actually helps cooling matter even more, which means that you can have even denser

regions in the universe.