Hello /r/science, I'm Shaun Hotchkiss. I research cosmology. I'm a post-doctoral researcher based at The University of Sussex, in England. You can find my research website here.

The things I've done active research on are: building and testing models of cosmological inflation, using the masses of the biggest galaxy clusters to probe the initial conditions of the observable universe, predicting the gravitational effects that cosmological structures have on light as it passes through them and finding and cataloguing cosmological "superstructures" (really big regions of the universe that are much more or much less dense than average).

I will be around from 6pm BST, 7pm CEST, 1pm EDT, 10am PDT, etc. I might have made a mistake in the timezones. To be safe, I live in the UK and will be online from 6pm our time.

I'm happy to answer any cosmology/science based questions. I'm also a kiwi, who has spent more than seven years living in Europe, including three in Finland, so feel free to ask about the life of a scientist and what it's like. I also think more scientists should enter politics, feel free to ask me about that. Basically, AMA (well, anything that /r/science will let you get away with!).

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Edit: OK, I'm here to answer questions, maybe an hour early. There seem to be quite a few questions, so I'll need all the extra time I can find.

Edit2: OK, I need to take a break for a little while. I'll be back soon to answer some more questions. In the meantime I thought I would point out that I do contribute to a blog, The Trenches of Discovery. There are three of us at the blog, ostensibly, though only two of us are active at the moment. We're all young researchers at the postdoctoral level, but in very different fields (part of the idea behind the blog is to open up a dialogue between different research fields). If you want to know more cosmology, feel free to check it out, but also read the biochemistry posts too. Finally, you can also find me on Twitter @just_shaun. I don't really tweet about much except cosmology.

Final Edit: OK, It's 23:57 here now. I need to get to sleep. My sincerest apologies if I couldn't get time to answer your question. I'll do my best to find time to answer some more questions in time, but I can't make any promises. If you do still have any burning questions then try asking them at /r/askscience. There are quite a few very knowledgeable cosmologists there with a knack for explaining things well. There are also the physics sections of Stack Exchange with many knowledgeable experts contributing. Luckily, there is also no shortage of cosmology bloggers out there with comments sections at their blogs, where you can ask questions about research. Finally, your local university almost certainly runs outreach events; whether you're a school student aspiring to be a physicist, or an active scientist in another field, or you're retired and curious to learn, or any other type of person with an interest in cosmology, you should look these events up and attend as many as you want. Oh, and don't under-estimate Twitter. There is quite a community of cosmologists and astrophysicists there, sharing news. It's difficult to have any comprehensive discussion, but when physics rumours break, that's where they tend to break first!

Lastly, thanks for all the great questions and feedback. It's wonderful to know that people find these topics so interesting and worthy of curiosity. Your tax pays for all of this research so make sure the people doing it take the time to share it with you. It is just as much yours as anyone else's!