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