Probing the Dark Universe
Dr. Josh Frieman Director of Dark Energy Survey
Fermilab & University of Chicago

           
Tickets - $7

Over the last two decades cosmologists have made a remarkable discovery about our Universe: only 4% is made of ordinary matter - atoms, molecules, etc. The other 96% is dark, in forms unlike anything with which we are familiar. About 25% is dark matter, which holds galaxies and larger-scale structures together and may be a new elementary particle. And 70% is thought to be dark energy, an even more mysterious entity which appears to be driving the expansion of the Universe to speed up. This talk will introduce the Dark Universe, overview what we have learned about it, and describe new experiments and observatories that aim to illuminate these enigmas.

Josh Frieman is senior staff scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. He currently directs the Dark Energy Survey, a collaboration of 300 scientists from 25 institutions on 3 continents, which built and is using a powerful 570-Megapixel camera on a telescope in Chile to carry out a 5-year survey of 300 million galaxies and thousands of supernovae to probe dark energy and the origin of cosmic acceleration.

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