The October 26th meeting of the RASC Mississauga Centre will feature a talk on the Dark Universe.
Talk Title: The Dark Universe
Speaker: Dr Laura Parker, McMaster University
Abstract:
A beautiful image from the Hubble Space Telescope showing a galaxy cluster made up of hundreds of galaxies (the orangish fuzzy objects in the image). Beautiful gravitational lensing arcs can also be seen. These arcs are actually background galaxies whose light has been distorted by the gravity of the galaxy cluster as it travels to us
Observational astronomers use telescopes that look at the furthest distances in the Universe to look back in time and trace the growth of structure in the cosmos. Recent multi-wavelength measurements have helped us to constrain the components that make up the Universe and how those components evolve. We now know that most of the Universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, but the nature of these components remains largely unknown. In this talk I will give an overview of the techniques used to map the universe on the largest scales, which have enabled us to measure dark energy and dark matter.
The Cosmological Pie - most of the stuff in the Universe is Dark Matter and Dark Energy, with only a small portion of normal matter (stuff made of atoms, like stars, planets and people)
Dr. Laura Parker is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at McMaster University. Her research group is interested in questions related to galaxy evolution and observational cosmology. In particular her group is trying to understand the connection between observed galaxy properties and the properties of the environments in which we find them, including the relationship between galaxies and their host dark matter halos.
Dr. Parker completed her PhD in Physics at the University of Waterloo in 2005 and was then a postdoctoral fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Munich before returning to Canada in 2007 to join the faculty at McMaster.
Dr Parker on top of Mauna Kea on the Big Island in Hawaii. Two telescopes partly funded by Canada (The Gemini-North Telescope and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope) can be seen behind me.
The meeting will be held from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. at The University of Toronto, Mississauga Campus, in room SE2074 William Davis Building. The meeting is open to the public and is free.
Enter off of Mississauga Road. Park in lot 4 or the parkade, across from the fitness centre south of theDavis Building. Enter through the Fitness centre, walk up the stairs untilyou reach the main corridor then turn right. (If you need an elevator,follow the corridor to the right of the stairs, then go up to the mainfloor.) Look for the Mississauga Centre sign in front of the lecture room. Directions
