Stony Brook University
Earrth and Space Sciences Building, Room 001
7:30 pm, Friday, April 07, 2023
The James Webb Space Telescope: Shedding Light on Dark Matter and Dark Energy
Prof. Simon Birrer
In this talk, I will summarize the current pending mysteries about our universe, dark matter and dark energy. I will highlight the incredible capacity of the latest and largest ever built space telescope to shed light on these unknown entities. I will review the work that has been done in the first year since the launch of JWST and look in the (near) future about the possible answers our latest instrument may provide us.
Professor Birrer started as an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook in January 2013. Previously, hee was a Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University (2019-2022) and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (2017-2019). Birrer received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2016 and did his undergraduate education (Bachelor and Master in Physics) at the same institution. Simon Birrer's research focus is to probe fundamental physics on cosmological scales. Birrer and his group are primary using gravitational lensing, a phenomena described by general relativity. Birrer’s scientific expertise is the interface between the exquisite data sets available on one side and the fundamental theory predictions on the other side. Birrer’s group is actively developing open-source advanced computational and statistical tools to extract detailed and robust information from strong lensing about the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
