Cosmology Seminar

Cosmology Seminars are held on Mondays at 11 am during Spring 2022, on the 3rd floor Varian conference room. These are more focused and less didactic than the colloquium, and provide a stage for younger researchers to present their work in more detail.  

Please contact Simon Birrer, Nick Kokron or Risa Wechsler for more information.

3D mapping of the dusty, magnetized ISM with starlight polarization

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Speaker
Gina Panopoulou (Caltech) via zoom

The coming decade will mark a milestone in our understanding of interstellar magnetism: achieving a first reconstruction of the Galactic magnetic field in 3D. This will be crucial for progress in fields such as CMB cosmology and cosmic ray physics. Achieving this goal relies on the combination of (a) high-accuracy data that probe interstellar magnetism and (b) novel algorithms that enable the combination of different datasets. A first step towards this direction can be made through the use of starlight polarization in combination with stellar distances.

Gravitational wave astrophysics and cosmology with large galaxy surveys

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Location

Campus, Varian 355

Speaker
Antonella Palmese (Fermilab)

In the occasion of the exciting discovery of the electromagnetic counterpart of the GW170817 gravitational wave event, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration produced a series of studies covering different aspects of the event. In particular, these studies showed that observations of the GW170817 host galaxy can provide information about the formation of the binary neutron star that merged, producing the gravit

Uncovering the nature of dark matter with stellar streams in the Milky Way

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Location

Campus, Varian 355

Speaker
Ana Bonaca (Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Stars orbiting in the halo of our galaxy, the Milky Way, are a window into the distribution of dark matter. Tidally disrupting star clusters are especially valuable tracers, because in pristine conditions they produce thin stellar streams of nearly uniform density.