12:00–1:00 pm GCIS W301/303
Title: In our lifetime, will we get to know what most of the universe is made of?
Abstract: Twenty-five years ago, the cosmology community took on a tough challenge: Could we develop the precision tools that could start to investigate the “stuff” – the dominant component of the universe, dark energy – that is causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate? Several generations of observational projects later, with increasingly capable tools, we are now, finally, starting to look at data that reaches the accuracy required to be in the game. Are we seeing new hints of surprising time-varying properties of dark energy that might help us understand it? Or are these first detailed measurements a “mirage,” likely to evaporate with more data triangulating in on the problem?
Three cosmological phenomena underpin the measurements that are currently especially used together to address this question: the CMB, BAO, and Type Ia supernovae. The recently released round of BAO measurements now puts the ball in the court of the supernova measurements – the focus of this colloquium – to match their level of precision.
Zoom: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/93092711418?pwd=ax8GAGcDkGPBQj9fe0P8I7TS1shSIl.1
