Events

"Measuring and modelling galaxy intrinsic alignment"

Dr Danielle Leonard is a Lecturer at the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics at Newcastle University. Their research focuses on late-time observational cosmology, particularly weak lensing and photometric galaxy clustering. They work both on understanding systematic effects which impact weak gravitational lensing measurements such as intrinsic alignment and photometric redshift uncertainties, and on methods for best constraining beyond-standard cosmological models with observational data.

Join us at Astronomy on Tap to hear about baryon acoustic oscillations, dark energy, and the new results coming from the DESI collaboration, from WCA researchers James Morawetz and Sofia Chiarenza!

"Probing Gravity on Cosmological Scales: Theories and Parametrizations"

Carola Zanoletti is a PhD student in cosmology at Newcastle University. She is testing models that modify the background expansion and growth of structure in the universe. She received her master's degree at the University of Cambridge, studying discretization conditions on the perturbation equations for a palindromic universe model at the Institute of Astronomy

"2, 3, 4 point functions: GPU, some math, some data"

Zack Slepian is currently a tenured associate professor in the astronomy department at the University of Florida, and previous to that held Einstein and Chamberlain fellowships at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory after a PhD at Harvard with Daniel Eisenstein. His major focus has been measuring and using higher-order clustering statistics of galaxies in redshift surveys such as BOSS, DESI and Roman, including the first detection of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the galaxy 3-point function, and intriguing evidence for parity violation in the galaxy 4-point function

Astrophysics deals with structures of incredible sizes and scales. But what are the biggest things out there, and how big can something actually get? In this month’s KPL astronomy talk, Roan Haggar will speak about galaxy clusters, the largest objects in our Universe that are held together by gravity, discussing what clusters are made from and what we can learn by studying them.

"The separate universe approach in multifield inflation models"

Hugo Holland is a second year PhD student in Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay (just south of Paris). He works with Julien Grain on stochastic inflation and all things related. Before his PhD, Hugo graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in France and got his masters degree in theoretical physics at King's College London, where he worked on eternal inflation with Eleni Alexandra Kontou.

"The Evolution of Galaxies as Told through Their Globular Cluster Systems"

Veronika Dornan is a final-year PhD candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at McMaster University. Her research uses observations of galaxies' globular star cluster systems as tracers of their evolutionary histories. She is particularly interested in studying the globular cluster system mass - halo mass scaling relation and understanding what drives this relation from dwarf galaxies to massive ellipticals galaxies.

Our knowledge and understanding about the Universe at present day brings together various famous discoveries made by astronomers. Many of these discoveries were made by women who never became household names. In this month’s KPL astronomy talk, Lammim Ahad will discuss some of the important work done by women who contributed significantly to astronomy and astrophysics, but whose contributions were often underappreciated or unrecognized at the time.

Join us at Astronomy on Tap to hear about our cosmic neighbourhood, from the Milky Way through the Local Group of galaxies, from WCA researchers Ana Ennis and Cam Morgan!

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is helping scientists to produce the largest and most comprehensive map of galaxies ever seen. This map is then being used by cosmologists to understand the growth of the Universe over cosmic time. In this month’s KPL astronomy talk, Dustin Lang will discuss the technology behind this innovative experiment, and how these advances have allowed cosmologists to make insights that change our view of the Universe.