Chris Morrison (UC Davis)

The Universe Under a Magnifying Glass: Gravitational Lensing and Cosmic Dust

Gravitational lensing was one of the fundamental predictions of

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and now serves as one of

astronomers' most powerful tools for understanding the universe.

Because it ties our observations of galaxies in the sky directly to

their mass, lensing offers a unique insight into the distribution of

dark matter in the universe as well as the growth of that structure

over time.  I will be presenting recently published results obtained

from the Deep Lens survey where we have used one aspect of

gravitational lensing to make the first detections of tomographic

lensing: simultaneously measuring lensing for multiple slices of the

universe to understand how the signal evolves over time.  This

technique is central to the next generation of large astronomical

surveys like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and I will include

discussion of what we hope to learn about dark matter and dark energy

when these are completed.

Sept 28 at 4pm in Geo/Phys Room 407