WORLD-RENOWNED artists, architects and scientists are heading to a historic Dumfriesshire former mining town to reveal the deepest secrets of the universe.

Celebrated land artist Charles Jencks, famous architect Daniel Libeskind and leading cosmologists Carlos Frenk and Noam Libeskind are inviting the public to join them for the new Cosmic Collisions, Birth, Rebirth and the Universe exhibition at the MERZ Gallery in Sanquhar.

All four will be taking part in talks about the deepest secrets of the universe and are also contributing to the exhibition, which is part of a host of activities at Crawick Multiverse over the weekend following the Summer Solstice on June 23 and 24.

The exhibition will include previously unseen preparatory drawings by New York-based Daniel Libeskind showing how spiral galaxies inspired his acclaimed new £11.5 million Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy at Durham University. Libeskind is the architect and designer of Berlin’s Jewish Museum and the Ground Zero site in New York.

The exhibition also features a new body of work by Jencks including a section titled Sex in the Universe. Jencks, the creator of the 55-acre Crawick Multiverse artland between Sanquhar and Kirkconnel, said: “Cosmic collisions can be catastrophic and creative, ugly and beautiful.

"It was one of these explosive encounters that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and allowed the rise of mammals, and ultimately our own species.

“Collisions happen at every level with meteors and comets striking planets, and stars and whole galaxies being driven into each other in a vast cosmic dance which is being choreographed by the power of gravity over billions of years.

“When spiral galaxies collide they bring billions of new, fast-burning stars into being, as well as many of the conditions for life itself. Astronomers call them the ‘Whirlpool, Cigar, Antennae, and Cartwheel galaxy’ – names that suggest their extraordinary shapes and amazing fecundity.

“It is wonderful that Daniel and Noam Libeskind, Carlos Frenk and our other special guests are coming to Sanquhar from all over the world to share their fascination and insights into issues that get right to the heart of creation and how it happens.”

Other highlights will include a cube created by the astrophysicist Dr Noam Libeskind, the son of Daniel Libeskind, which maps Laneakia, the supercluster of 100,000 large galaxies to which our Milky Way belongs.

There will be a “galaxy-making machine” supplied by Frenk, who is Ogden Professor of Computational Cosmology at Durham University.

Frenk is among the four astrophysicists credited with one of the most important theories in the field: that the universe is full of cold dark matter. In 2011 he and his colleagues were awarded the Gruber prize, one of the leading accolades in astronomy, for their theory.

He will give the keynote address on Friday June 23, on the emergence of structure in the universe, Everything From Nothing: How our Universe was Made.

Taking part in talks the following day will be Open University Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences Monica Grady CBE, and Glasgow University Professor of Astrophysics Martin Hendry MBE.

Hendry is a key member of the Ligo scientific collaboration – a global team of more than 1,000 scientists who, along with their colleagues in the Virgo collaboration, made the breakthrough discovery of gravitational waves – ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein but undetected for a century. Grady is a leading British space scientist known primarily for her work on meteorites.

The weekend talks will also include presentations by science students from the nearby Wallace Hall Academy and Sanquhar Academy.