Mapping the Universe with Dark Energy Survey

Wednesday, October 23, 2019 11:15 am - 11:15 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Astronomy Seminar Series

Dragan Huterer, University of Michigan

I will give a theory-centered overview of the results from the Dark Energy Survey, an experiment mapping the large-scale structure in order to better understand the cause of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Year-1 DES analyses published in 2017/18 included the combination of galaxy clustering, cosmic shear, and their cross-correlation to impose constraints on key cosmological parameters, while the imminent Year-3 and, later, Year-6 analyses will dramatically improve those constraints. I will briefly outline the status of our general understanding of dark energy, then discuss the results and some of the challenges in the DES analysis, and finally identify the most promising methodologies to better understand the nature of dark energy.


Dragan is a theoretical cosmologist, and works as a professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. Before Michigan he was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, before that a postdoc in the Particle-Astrophysics Group at Case Western Reserve University, before that a graduate student at the University of Chicago, before that an undergraduate at MIT, and still before that a student at Gimnazija "Ognjen Prica" in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (then Yugoslavia).