7:00–8:00 pm ERC 161
Bio: Sukanya Chakrabarti is the Pei-Ling Chan Endowed Chair and a Professor of Physics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she leads the "Precision Lab for Dark Matter," hunting for dark matter's invisible fingerprints across the Milky Way.
Description: Dark matter, although believed to be pervasive, is still one of the most mysterious concepts in modern astronomy. We have begun a series of extreme-precision observing campaigns to directly measure the tiny accelerations (about 10 cm/s/decade - the speed of a crawling baby) of stars that live within the gravitational potential of our Galaxy. These measurements now give us the most precise probe of dark matter in our Galaxy, and I will discuss our recent constraints on a dark matter clump near our Sun. Future acceleration measurements of dark matter clumps in our Galaxy may indeed reveal the nature of dark matter.
