What does it mean that the universe is dying — slowly, quietly, running out of usable energy? How does where a galaxy grows up shape what it becomes? And how do we actually know that the gold in your wedding ring was forged in the collision of two dead stars?

Associate Professor Luke Davies is an astrophysicist at the University of Western Australia, based at ICRAR (the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research). He leads some of the largest galaxy surveys on Earth, spending a decade mapping how a galaxy's cosmic neighbourhood shapes its growth, size, and fate — think nature versus nurture, but for entire worlds. He's also hosted Neil deGrasse Tyson and curated TEDxPerth.

We talk about what it means to literally look backwards in time, why the universe's slow death is more interesting than alarming, the violent stellar collisi ...