Hello, please introduce yourself briefly to our readers.
Hi, my name is Julian Merten, I am 36 years old and have a doctorate in physics, or astrophysics to be exact. Or even more precisely, I'm a cosmologist. I studied and obtained my doctorate in Heidelberg, where I also spent a short post-doc time. After that I went to the Caltech [California Institute of Technology] in Pasadena near Los Angeles for four years, where I also worked on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA. I then had teaching and research assignments in Oxford and Bologna. Now, I just recently started here at the company.
Sounds like you're a real scientist. What exactly does cosmology research into?
We look at the cosmos as a whole, so not individual planets, stars or galaxies but the entire Universe. We know a few things about it, but there's a great deal we don't know. We know how old it is, and also that there was once a state where the cosmos was absolutely tiny, energy-charged and hot. But for example, we don't understand why the Universe has expanded faster than previously for roughly one billion years. And as we don't know why this happens, we refer to the cause as "dark energy".