welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information issues to the general public this is our website for our program listings and about the inflationary impact of the universe our guest is theoretical physicist he men as i create a professor of theoretical physics and astrophysics at the institute of cosmos sciences university of barcelona spain dr you may notice i should mention has several other academic appointments as well and these are listed on tonight's event page on our website it is our good fortune he's here this year is a fellow at the for advanced study at harvard university dr menace has made numerous contributions to our understanding of the universe including evidence for dark energy the relationship between cosmic explosions and survival of life and the expansion history of the universe dr menace received his ph d in theoretical physics from the niels bohr institute at the university of copenhagen after a peep park advanced fellowship at the institute for astronomy university of edinburgh he joined the faculties of rutgers university and later university of pennsylvania in two thousand and eight he returned to spain to take up his i korea position at the university of barcelona dr minus has received dimmers awards from the european union and his research has been featured in such international media outlets or for any kind of life so they were monitoring the sky and then southerly merely after the saturday started going on they said to see these flashes of gamma rays right now the obama meat so they were very that are very energetic and these photons are going to be the grammarians that we see on earth can i interrupt just for one second ask that we could see the image of this because you mention the jets right we see th black holes when they show images of black holes it's the same around yana stars we do see these jets ok the difference here is that these jet is going to encounter the enveloped interest or medium of the star ok so in the process of piecing through source of these very long government rivers because when we have been looking with telescopes we can very easily associate gamma rays the high frequency events that we just don't see that often we don't detect that often or are there rare i think they're rare they're generally rare i think that  many many many more of them and they're not detecting them it's that they are we are we have a good sense use of them so we know how many there are ok and we know that they don't happen very often case it was smaller now you and a colleague worked on how this affects life potentially this is in an economist article and it is on our web page for your  to you because there are so few of them the basically you could be looking at the gamma rate in the sky looking at it nothing will happen to you but they do something that it is a bit more cumbersome because it was very quickly recognized that there was a problem right it is no good if we get this post to u v radiation because that basically damages their d n a it also lied that couples very well with the as if it was close enough and that would basically cause extinction because you will destroy the food chain by basically killing all the photosynthesis generation in the planet and then you run out of the adjusting but this will be an instantaneous picture guy from one day to another yet from one day to another you have no solid you so not time to react right now think about not us intelligent human beings think about when you these catastrophic events happening on earth is about hundred percent within the last billion years and so every billion years there is one of these catastrophic events that i believe was the earlier universe where things were closer together and there were more more rider a bird at that time i believe you here so you know it takes time until the universe grows bigger our lives then and you have more space to actually hide from these explosions and therefore that was why you would but they are not damaging to us in the sense that they don't pose a risk to us they basically are good because they produce the elements we need for lie and they put it out data and your collecting them is so enormous that you're basically going to be able to see everything yes saw before we were able to see only a few stars go in on now we see them all sure that you must be looking forward to that i'm very much looking forward to that i'm very much looking forward to the next generation of a space of server tori's but also to get on base telescopes ou know looking for them trying to figure out what they are i would not tell them we're here i wouldn't be where he will arise i will not tell them where we are done with i would do ok i want to ask you another thing that you have worked on and it's related there i understand that this year while you're at radcliffe that you're working on the inflation we have in the general p d and i include in that documentaries on astronomy and so on we have a very pristine view about the inflation that period right after the big bang and everything went out and it went out smoothly and nicely so i have a bag and then no problems could you tell us something about that if there are problems and what you're working on these interesting