STA 290 Seminar: Chris Fassnacht

STA 290 Seminar Series

Thursday, October 15th, 4:10pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)

Refreshments at 3:30pm in MSB 4110 (Statistics Lounge)

Speaker:    Chris Fassnacht (Dept. Physics, UC Davis)

Title:          Measuring Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe

Abstract:    One of the great mysteries of the Universe is that only 4 percent of it is made up of material that we understand.  The remaining 96 percent is composed of "dark matter" and "dark energy", neither of which is understood at this time.  I will describe aspects of my research that focus on measuring the properties of the dark Universe, using a phenomenon called gravitational lensing as a tool.  I will show that in these projects, statistics play a key role in the analysis of the data and especially in the interpretation of the results.