Astro Seminar Series - VIA ZOOM

Dan Scolnic is an assistant professor of physics at Duke University.  He received his B.S. from MIT and PhD from Johns Hopkins University.  He received a NASA Hubble Fellowship as well as a Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics Fellowship for his postdoctoral work at The University of Chicago.  This year, Dan won the prestigious Packard Fellowship.  Dan leads work in multiple collaborations on using Type Ia Supernovae to measure cosmological parameters.  

Title and Abstract for Dan's talk:

New Advances with Type Ia Supernovae To Measure The Expansion of the Universe

Abstract:

Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) are critical tools for measuring the current expansion rate of the universe, described by the Hubble Constant, and the accelerating expansion, due to a mysterious `dark energy’.  As measurements from SNe Ia continue to be important and exciting, there has been widespread interest on strengths and limitations of using SNe Ia in analyses.  Here, I review the latest cosmological results using SNe Ia as well as systematic uncertainties and needed improvements for future analyses.  I present a new key insight on the physics of SNe that addresses some of the most confounding issues of the last decade. I discuss the state of the `Hubble Constant Tension’ and upcoming measurements of the local cosmic distance ladder. I then will transition to future experiments like LSST and WFIRST, and show forecasts of the amazing constraints on cosmological parameters with 100x the statistics of current samples.

Would you like to join this Zoom seminar?  Please email Donna Hayes.