The Accelerated Universe through Weak Lensing

  • Nov. 18, 2019, 2:00 pm US/Central
  • Curia II
  • Agnès Ferté, Jet Propulsion Laboratory / California Institute of Technology

The universe has been going through a phase of accelerated expansion for the last 6 billion years. Understanding the origin of this cosmic acceleration is one of the main goals of observational cosmology: is it caused by a cosmological constant or a dynamical dark energy? Or is it a sign that we don’t understand the laws of gravity on cosmological scales?

To answer these fundamental questions, we need to solve both experimental and theoretical challenges. In this talk I will present my current research on characterizing the new generation of detectors that will be used by future galaxy surveys at the Precision Projector Laboratory at Caltech. I will then present results on tests of gravity on large scales through weak lensing measurements by galaxy surveys including the Dark Energy Survey.