(ambient ethereal music)
- Galaxy clusters are the most
extreme regions in the universe.
Containing hundreds, or even thousands
of galaxies, they're the
most massive structures
ever discovered by man.
When you look out in the universe,
you can take galaxies,
broadly place them into two categories.
Either they're currently forming stars
or that star formation
finished billions of years ago.
Now in the most extreme
regions of the universe
that second category,
so called Red and Dead galaxies,
are at their most common.
In these extreme regions,
there are processes
that are strong enough
that they can actually
shut off star formation in many galaxies.
We're interested in the physics
that changes galaxies
and made the universe
how we see it today.
The processes and the galaxies
that we deal with are of course
far too big and far away.
What we have to do is
look out to the universe.
In astronomy, the universe
is your laboratory.
We have the first ever
Canadian Large Program
on a telescope in Chile known as ALMA.
Now ALMA is an array of dishes
that sits on a very high desert plateau
in the Atacama desert.
And what ALMA does, is it
looks out into the universe
and it's one of the best instruments
for observing the cold, dense clouds
of gas actually go on to form stars.
You want to understand
how star formation is affected,
you have to look at the
fuel for those stars.
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