Physics & Astronomy Colloquium — Dr. Heidi Wu
About the event
The Department of Physics and Astronomy invites all to a colloquium featuring Dr. Heidi Wu, Department of Physics at Boise State University. Dr. Wu will present their talk, “Probing Cosmic Acceleration with Galaxy Clusters”.
Abstract: The accelerated expansion of the Universe is one of the biggest puzzles in physics: Why is gravity repulsive rather than attractive on distance scales larger than a few million lightyears? Cosmic acceleration slows down the growth of structure, and we can use galaxy clusters — the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe — to probe the nature of cosmic acceleration. In this talk, I will first introduce our current understanding of the Universe. I will then discuss how we use sky surveys of galaxy clusters to measure cosmic acceleration, and how the several ambitious ground- and space-missions will revolutionize our understanding of the Universe.