Probing Cosmic Acceleration with DESI: Is Dark Energy Evolving?
The Universe is expanding—but how has that expansion changed over time?
The DESI project (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) has analysed light from over 14 million galaxies and quasars to investigate this expansion. DESI has recently released its Year 3 results (Data Release 2), offering new insights into what might be driving its accelerated expansion, such as dark energy. One of the tools used to study the expansion is called Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO), which acts like a ‘standard ruler’.
By measuring its size across different epochs of the Universe DESI can trace the expansion. The rate of expansion, measured by analysing this data together with other independent observational probes such as the cosmic microwave background and supernovae, shows some interesting differences from the well established standard model of the Universe. In this seminar, we’ll present DESI’s latest findings and explore why they might suggest that the Universe is a little more complex than we thought.
Speakers: Laura Casas and Sindhu Satyavolu
Laura Casas has a degree in mathematics by the Imperial College London and a Masters’ in Physics by the the The University of Edinburgh. She works with the Lyman Alpha Forest, a series of absorption features in the light spectrum of very distant galaxies (over 10,000 million light-years away), which allows us to understand the distribution of hydrogen in the Universe and how it evolves. By studying this distribution, we can learn about dark energy and its role in the expansion of the Universe. Specifically, Laura works on simulations that help validate the analyses performed using data from the DESI telescope.
Dr. Sindhu Sri Sravya Satyavolu obtained her PhD in Physics from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. Her thesis focused on the proximity zones of quasars during the epoch of reionization. Her research interests include high-redshift quasars, supermassive black hole growth, the intergalactic medium, reionization, and cosmology. She is part of the XQR-30 and EREBUS-JWST collaborations, and at IFAE, she is part of the DESI collaboration to study the Lyman-alpha forest.
Join us online on Thursday, the 5th of June at 15:00 CEST!
