Dark Energy
In 1998, astronomers studying supernovae made the surprising discovery that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating; their work was recognized by the 2011 Nobel Prize.
The mysterious stuff driving this acceleration was named ‘dark energy’, and is now known to account for about 70% of the Universe’s density. There are a number of proposals for what dark energy is, ranging from Einstein’s cosmological constant to scalar fields to modifications to General Relativity on cosmological distance scales. Understanding the nature of dark energy is a major area of research in modern cosmology.
Supervisor Profiles & Available Research Projects
Dr Christian Reichardt
- Galaxy cluster cosmology
- Tests of dark energy using galaxy cluster abundances
The Fornax Galaxy Cluster is one of the closest galactic groupings beyond our Local Group of galaxies. The VLT Survey Telescope image shows the central part of the cluster. At the lower-right is the spiral galaxy NGC 1365 and to the left the elliptical NGC 1399. Credit: ESO
- A toy model of galaxy evolution inspired by stellar metallicity measurements from the SAMI survey Wednesday December 2nd 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Dr S[...]
- CMB Cosmology with BICEP/Keck and SPT-3G Wednesday November 25th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Dr[...]
- Veloce - and what it takes to open new discovery phase space for exoplanets, without spending a bomb. Wednesday November 18th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Pro[...]
- The evolution (or not) of the star formation efficiency, dust content, and duty cycle of high-z galaxies Wednesday November 11th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Dr[...]
- Can uncertainties in the evolution of the massive stars explain EM and GW observations? Wednesday October 21st 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Pooj[...]
- Probing the nature of dark matter with galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing Wednesday October 14th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Doro[...]
- Real or not real? What cosmological simulations can (and cannot) tell us about the cold phase of the CGM Wednesday September 30th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Dr[...]