Physics Department Colloquia |
Events During the Week of February 25th through March 4th, 2018
Monday, February 26th, 2018
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, February 27th, 2018
- No events scheduled
Wednesday, February 28th, 2018
- No events scheduled
Thursday, March 1st, 2018
- No events scheduled
Friday, March 2nd, 2018
- Exploring the dark universe with cosmic surveys
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: 2241 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Keith Bechtol, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
- Abstract: Over the past few decades, a “standard” but puzzling cosmological model has emerged that has passed increasingly stringent observational tests, and yet raises many new questions. What is causing the accelerated expansion of the Universe? What are the particle constituents of dark matter? Can we measure the influence of massive neutrinos on the growth of cosmic structure? The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is one of several ongoing experiments producing ever larger and more detailed maps of the night sky to address these questions via statistical inference from measurements of hundreds of millions of individual stars and galaxies. I will highlight several recent results from DES, including cosmology constraints from gravitational weak lensing, galaxy clustering, and supernovae, newfound dwarf galaxies and stellar streams, and the first optical detection of a kilonova explosion associated with a gravitational wave signal. I will conclude with a discussion of the next major experiment in this field, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), now under construction in Chile, with first light expected in 2020.
- Host: Sridhara Dasu