Events

Globular clusters are ancient groups of stars found in every single galaxy, and they are key tools for studying the evolution of the Universe. These dense cosmic cities contain some of the oldest stars in existence, offering us a glimpse back in time. In this month’s KPL astronomy talk, Ana Ennis will teach us what globular clusters are, how we think they are made, and all the things we can learn from them, from black hole formation to galaxy evolution.

"DESI DR2: Survey Overview, Cosmological Constraints from BAO, and Preparation for Full-Shape Analyses"

Ardaud de Mattia (CEA Saclay) is a member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, where he has worked successively on photometric systematics (through image simulations), clustering catalogs and two-point statistics, and cosmological parameter inference. Arnaud is deeply involved in pipeline development for DESI — from catalog creation to cosmological constraints — leveraging GPU computing and automatic differentiation whenever relevant. He is also interested in galaxy field-level inference as a more comprehensive approach to cosmological analysis.

"From Science to Data Science: How to Land a Job in Industry."

Elena Massara is a Machine Learning Scientist at TD Bank and holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from SISSA (Italy, 2016). She previously held postdoctoral research positions at the University of California, Berkeley; the Flatiron Institute in New York; and the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics in Canada.

"Halo Clustering, Galaxy Clustering, and the Theory and Detection of Assembly Bias"

Andrew Zentner is Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2007. Originally, from Queens, in New York City, Andrew earned a B. S. in Electrical Engineering from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a unique, tuition-free school in New York’s East Village, in 1998. He earned his Ph. D. in Physics from The Ohio State University in 2003. Subsequently, Andrew conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago where he was a Kavli Fellow and a National Science Foundation Fellow before joining the faculty at Pittsburgh. 

"Probing the Dark Sector: Implications of DESI's Dynamic Dark Energy Results"

Sven’s (UCSC) scientific journey has been shaped by trying to ensure accurate and precise results from weak lensing surveys. His contributions to this field are both direct investigations of potential systematic biases (such as variable survey depth) as well as the establishment of higher-order lensing statistics (persistent homology and third-order shear statistics, in collaboration with Pierre) for a robust cosmological inference. As a member of DESI, he performed the validation of Galaxy Lensing measurements for subsequent cosmological analyses.

Most of the matter in the Universe is dark matter: an elusive particle that is completely invisible. But we can “see” this matter by studying how it distorts the light from galaxies in the distant Universe, a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. In this month's KPL astronomy talk, Mike Hudson will give a whirlwind tour of gravitational lensing’s “greatest hits” showing how it can be used as a tool to understand some of the most mysterious things in the Universe: from black holes to the “cosmic web” of dark matter that links galaxies together.

"Do Nearby Habitable-World Candidates Have an Atmosphere?"

Professor René Doyon’s research activities are focussed on the development of state-of-the-art astronomical instrumentation for various ground- and space-based observatories. He is also actively involved in various observational programs for detecting and characterizing brown dwarfs, exoplanets and young low-mass stars. Professor Doyon is the Director of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets and the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic.

At Astronomy on Tap this month, WCA researchers Ana Ennis and Cam Morgan will speak about the most powerful telescopes from the past, present, and the future!

Jamie McCullough is a postdoctoral researcher in observational cosmology at Princeton University, using the measurements of galaxy shapes to trace the large-scale structure of the universe and the growth of that structure with cosmic time.

Dr Carlos Garcia Garcia is a cosmologist working at the interface of data and theory to understand the nature of dark energy. He received his PhD in 2020 from the University of Barcelona and has spent the past five years as a Beecroft Fellow at the University of Oxford. Carlos is active in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Dark Energy Science Collaboration, where he has held different leadership roles, most recently serving as co-convener of the Weak Lensing and Large-Scale Structure working group. He is also a member of Euclid.