George James Conidis: Two Galaxies to Rule Them All!

I am a PhD Candidate in astrophysics and have been working on understanding why the galaxies surrounding our own galaxy, The Milky Way, are organized as we see them. To answer this question I have identified copies of our neighborhood of galaxies in our Universe. The copies have a similar shape and number of galaxies as our neighborhood, including a copy of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy pair. It has been discovered The Milky Way and The Andromeda galaxy have bullied their neighboring galaxies into this unexpected configuration, forever enriching our galaxy’s story and importance in the nearby cosmos.

George Conidis, is a PhD candidate at York University in Canada, investigating how our neighborhood of galaxies, known as the Local Sheet, formed and evolved. He has discovered copies of our neighborhood in our Universe to help answer fundamental questions about our past. He recently received the 2015 Mitacs PhD Award for Outstanding Innovation, a national award bestowed on the most innovative PhD that was granted funds from Mitacs. He was presented with this award for his revolutionary 3D analysis of how galaxies spin in these copies which suggests the well accepted theory of how galaxies spin in such environments is incorrect. George Conidis will present a tour through our neighborhood of galaxies stopping along the way to highlight how his research has added to our appreciation of our home in the cosmos.