For seminars and other local announcements, please subscribe to sfu-cosmo mailing list.
Thursday, 8 March 2007, 13:00 in P8445B
Dr. Catherine Heymans (UBC)
Probing dark matter and dark energy with weak gravitational lensing
Cosmology is the scientific study of the Universe, striving to answer the most fundamental questions about its origin, history and future. Already we know that only a small fraction of our Universe is made up of the material that we are familiar with on Earth. The rest is made up of an unknown Dark Matter component that surrounds all galaxies, and an unknown Dark Energy component that is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Measuring the exact quantities of each of our Universe's components is the great achievement of modern day Cosmology, revealing a rather sad fate for the Universe; it will simply expand forever becoming colder and emptier. That we have no grasp of the nature and origin of dark matter or dark energy however remains rather unsatisfactory!
In this talk I will describe a new technique, called `weak gravitational lensing', that can not only detect dark matter but also has the great promise of being able to measure the properties of dark energy. I will discuss the physics that underpins this method and present maps of the distribution of dark matter across an area of sky the size of the full moon. I will also describe an exciting future NASA mission that will utilize this lensing technique to uncover the origin of the mysterious dark energy.
Seminars in 2006:
[ See complete seminar archives | iCal feed ]
Modified by Andrei Frolov <frolov@sfu.ca> on 2023-11-01