Stony Brook University
7:30 pm
ESS Building, Room 001
Friday, Dece,ber 06, 2024
Einstein zig-zag: how scientists (aka me) got fooled and how things become obvious in hindsight.
Prof. Simon Birrer
Strong gravitational lensing is the phenomena when a massive object (such as a galaxy) bends background light leading to highly distorted images. This phenomena is rare, but has been observed with hundreds of strong lenses. Even much more rare and speculative is the alignment of two deflector galaxies in a configuration that the light rays gets double-bent to a zig-zag rout. The first discovery of such a Einstein zig-zag was published last month. In this talk, I present the inside story from my personal perspective how the team of scientists first was fooled to believe this lensing system was a different configuration, and what unambiguous data eventually lead to the inside that this lensing system is a one-of-a-kind Einstein zig-zag lens.
Professor Birrer started as an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook in January 2023. 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.
