Luke 'Skywalker' aims to help unlock mysteries of galaxies far far away
Luke 'Skywalker' Jew is on the brink of going where no man has gone before – exploring the start of the universe in the first few seconds after the Big Bang.
The Stourbridge student is walking on air after North American cosmologists announced that they have opened a pin-prick vision through a window beyond the Milky Way to the very start of the universe 14 billion years ago.
Luke, aged 23, and his team from Oxford University, where he is studying for his doctorate at Oriel College, are in the final stages of calibrating a new telescope in the South African desert, which aims to go beyond that window.
"We will be filtering out the Milky Way to explore the area opened up by this pinprick," said Luke, a former pupil at Old Swinford Hospital School, Stourbridge.
"The discovery, made by an international collaboration from the Bicep (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation) telescope at the South Pole, is the Holy Grail of cosmology. It will probably win a Nobel prize because, for the first time, it proves the theory of primordial gravitational waves, which are an echo of the Big Bang which caused the universe to expand rapidly and hugely. And for us it has opened up a window through which we plan to see the wider picture of the Big Bang and the creation of the universe."
Luke, who lives with his mother, Jane, sister Eva and brothers Joe and Danny in Heath Street, Stourbridge, is nicknamed 'Luke Skywalker' by his family.
He is working with the CBASS (C-Band All Sky Survey) project, a collaboration among the Universities of Oxford and Manchester and cosmolotists from around the world. They are building a telescope at Hartebeesthoek in the Cradle of Humanity, near Johannesburg and the project also has a telescope in California.
