The ICC, Institute for Computational Cosmology, was founded in November, with the aim of explaining the very earliest moments of the universe, the nature of dark matter, and the final fate of the universe.
Initially it was housed in the newly built Ogden Centre, an extension onto the back of the Rochester building, but in 2016 the centre relocated to the second Ogden Centre building on the west of the Science Site.
In this year, the ICC's then Director Carlos Frenk was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Later, in 2014, he received a gold medal for his work, and in 2017, a CBE.
In this year, ICC member (and now its Director) Shaun Cole, along with John Peacock and Daniel Eisenstein, conducted work to show that baryonic oscillations could be used to measure distances in the universe and its expansion rate. Their research on the 2DF Galaxy Redshift Survey used a sample of 250,000 galaxies recorded on the anglo-australian telescope, and would later win them the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.
The dome of the Durham Observatory was recovered, repaired and returned to the building. However, by this time, the Observatory was used only for automatic machine-led meteorological readings.
Early in the new millennium, the ICC produced the Eagle Project, meaning the Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environments, a simulation aimed at chronicling the formation and evolution of galaxies. The project produces models of massive expansions of space, up to 300 million light-years across, space enough to contain a hundred thousand galaxies the same size as our Milky Way.
The Durham X-Ray Centre was launched as a collaboration of members from the Departments of Chemistry, Earth Science, Biological and Biomedical Science, Physics and Archaeology.
Astronomy blossoms further, and a second Ogden building to house the growing ICC and Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy becomes a reality
