Probing the Dark Side: An Early Announcement. (July 8, 2009)|
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News & Views item - July 2009 |
Probing the Dark Side: An Early Announcement. (July 8, 2009)
Looking for the unseeable is an intriguing and even a seductive way of spending one's life, and come October 1, 2009 Royal Society Fellow, Sarah Bridle, will be explaining the hows and whys.
So, why bring this up in TFW, it's over 2½ months and half a world away?
Well, perhaps a reader or two might like to pencil in the timing in order to catch the web cast, and also it's an opening to suggest that Australia's Chief Scientist being an astronomer might consider giving a series of lectures to our federal parliamentarians on the joys and wonders of astronomy and invite some of the more articulate Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science to talk science and even maths, not with the begging bowl in hand while preaching gospel, but showing the grander and excitement of their subjects.
Seeing the invisible: observing the dark side of the universe
Sarah Bridle It seems that most of the universe is made up of mysterious ingredients which we cannot see directly. I will describe in pictures "gravitational lensing", the bending of light by gravity, which is predicted by Einstein's General Relativity. The dark components of the universe do not emit or absorb light, but do exert a gravitational attraction, and it turns out that gravitational lensing is one of the most promising methods for finding out more about them. This is very similar to looking through a bathroom at streetlamps outside, and using the distorted images to learn about the patterns in the glass. I will review the current observations and the upcoming surveys. Sarah Bridle is a Reader and Royal Society University
Research Fellow at University College London. She obtained her PhD in
2000 from Cambridge University before moving to Toulouse, France for
postdoctoral research. She returned to Cambridge with a College
Fellowship and was appointed Lecturer at University College London five
years ago, spending much of 2008 on sabbatical in Paris. She was
recently awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's 2009 Fowler This lecture is free - no ticket or advanced booking required. Doors open at 5.45pm and seats will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. This lecture will be webcast LIVE at royalsociety.org/live and available to view on demand within 48 hours of delivery.
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