Astro Seminar Series - VIA ZOOM

Wednesday, March 17, 2021 11:30 am - 11:30 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Ravi Sheth
Ravi Sheth was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge where he got my PhD in 1994. He then spent time at UCBerkeley (1994-1996), the Max-Planck Institut fuer Astrophysik in Garching (1996-1999), and Fermilab (1999-2001) before becoming an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh (2002-2004).  Professor Sheth moved to Penn in 2005, where he became an Associate Professor in 2007 and a full Professor in 2009. Ravi spends his summers at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, and serves as a member of the Science Advisory Board of the Kaufman Foundation and the Scientific Council of the East Africa Institute for Fundamental Research.

Talk Title and Abstract:

Acceleration on cosmological and galactic scales

Large sky surveys use the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation feature in the distribution of galaxies and gas today as a standard rod with which to constrain the expansion/acceleration history of the universe.  Some standardization of the rod is necessary to deliver accurate percent level constraints on the expansion history, and I will describe a novel method - Laguerre reconstruction (Nikakhtar, Sheth & Zehavi) - for attempting this.  If time permits, I will then describe the results of a study of acceleration on smaller scales.  The Radial Acceleration Relation is a correlation between the total acceleration observed around a galaxy and that due to its baryons.   Its shape and tightness have both been used to motivate alternatives to  General Relativity.  I will discuss how it emerges in LCDM models (Paranjape & Sheth).

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