The History of the Cosmos (and our understanding of it)

Speaker: Tesla Jeltema is a faculty member in the Physics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Associate Director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. She is also currently serving as the Deputy Spokesperson for the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (https://lsstdesc.org/). Her research interests focus on constraining the nature of dark matter and dark energy using the formation and evolution of large-scale structure in the universe. Outside of work, she spends her time with her two, crazy kids; she also a competitive open water swimmer and last year swam the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain to Morocco.

Abstract: There is strong evidence that our Universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old, that it has expanded and evolved from the Big Bang to today, forming in the process stars, galaxies, and a rich network of larger-scale structures. I will review the history of our universe and its composition, including dark matter and dark energy. With the lens of an observational astrophysicist, I will discuss some of the major observations that led us to this picture and how current and future experiments will enable us to further our understanding of the cosmos.

Host or Publisher Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies