Data from BICEP2 gathered in the South Pole reveals swirls in the CMB, the first image of gravitational waves and evidence for inflation.

David Sloan calculates how likely it is that our Universe exists. He explains to us how, and why the answer can help shape our theories of physics.

There's no doubt that maths is very good at describing the world around us. Could this be because the Universe we live in is itself a mathematical structure? We talk to Max Tegmark.

In this podcast we talk to Max Tegmark about his hypothesis that the Universe we live in is a mathematical structure.

Images are now being taken on the world's most powerful digital camera. For over 500 nights over the next five years the Dark Energy Camera will photograph the light from more than 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light-years away in each image.

Cosmologists gathered in the Netherlands last week to discuss a new view of the Universe. The Universe as seen by Planck was an international conference to discuss the recently released scientific results from the Planck satellite, including two particularly striking snapshots of the early Universe.

Some of the things I overheard at Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday conference did make me wonder whether I hadn't got the wrong building and stumbled in on a sci-fi convention. "The state of the multiverse". "The Universe is simple but strange". "The future for intelligent life is potentially infinite". And — excuse me — "the Big Bang was just the decay of our parent vacuum"?!

This is the first part of the lecture given by Astronomer Royal Martin Rees at Stephen Hawking's birthday symposium.

This is the second part of the lecture given by Astronomer Royal Martin Rees at Stephen Hawking's birthday symposium.

This is an excerpt from Stephen Hawking's address to his 70th birthday symposium which took place on 8th January 2011 in Cambridge.