Exploring the Dark Cosmos through Gravitational Lensing

The enormous sea of stars that fills a clear night sky and all the Earthly matter that we see account for only 4% of the energy budget of the Universe. About 26% is in the form of “dark matter” and the remaining 70% is the so-called “dark energy”, both of which are nature’s great puzzles. In this lecture, I will show how gravitational lensing, a phenomenon where light is bent around massive objects, probes both dark matter and dark energy.