WATERLOO — With a new research centre launched by an anonymous $5-million donation and some star power from the world's most famous cosmologist, the Perimeter Institute is celebrating a "golden age" of discovery for those who study the universe.

The Waterloo-based hub for theoretical physics unveiled its new Centre for the Universe this week — and its mandate is no small task. By recruiting some of the brightest young scientists on the planet, they hope to answer some of most puzzling questions about the nature of reality itself.

"Cosmology has always provided some of science's biggest conundrums. Now, it is providing many of the most important clues which are guiding the future development of fundamental physics," Perimeter's director Neil Turok said in a statement.

"We are fortunate to live in a golden age of discovery of the universe."

The new centre, started with a $5-million donation but with plans to grow that to $25 million, will be used to recruit dozens of young researchers in the field of cosmology and give them the resources they need to do their work.

The centre, which won't exist in a physical sense, will be looking for new ways to test long-held ideas about the universe. It also will probe the mysteries around black holes, the big bang, dark matter, dark energy, and other fundamental questions in cosmology.

Kendrick Smith, a cosmologist whose specialty is analyzing vast amounts of data, is one of the scientists who led the steering committee to create the new centre. He said it's exciting to see this kind of funding for ambitious research in basic science.

Mankind has been looking up at the skies and asking similar kinds of questions for a very long time, he said. We're finally getting close to discovering some of the answers.

"These are some of the oldest and most self-motivating questions in science, like how did the universe begin," Smith said.

"These are things we're still at a loss to explain. The more we understand, we're realizing there are many more questions. We're only pulling back the layers of the onion and revealing new questions."

Smith, a former mathematician and software developer, is best known for his work in what's called cosmic microwave background. That's the oldest light in the universe, which first appeared just 300,000 years after the big bang itself.

Smith is unique in his field, in that he's one of the few people with the expertise to analyze the "avalanche" of data being produced by new experiments in cosmology.

He helped developed the algorithm used by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment to process hundreds of astronomical events called fast radio bursts. Built near Penticton, British Columbia, the massive radio telescope is trying to measure the expansion of the universe and detect gravitational waves.

With his background in pure math and software, Smith is helping to bridge the gap between theoretical physics and data analysis. He's a new type of scientist who knows what to do with the flood of information coming from new research into our universe's basic building blocks.

"I like to work on problems that are in-between," he explained.

The Centre for the Universe was kicked off with the creation of three new fellowships, named after prominent cosmologists. One of them, Stephen Hawking, is a close friend of Perimeter director Turok, who will lead the new centre when he eventually steps down from his current post.

"I am honoured to have my name associated with one of the new fellowships," Hawking said, in a video played at the announcement.

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"Cosmology is one of the most exciting fields in science today. We are on the verge of major discoveries about the universe and its origins. I hope and expect many of those discoveries will be made at Perimeter."

The two other fellowships are named for the late Russian physicist Yakov Zel'dovich and Canadian-American researcher James Peebles, a professor emeritus at Princeton.