Colloquium
Last Updated March 12, 2024
The upcoming colloquium is shown below. The current schedule for the remainder of the semester can be seen here. Previous abstracts of colloquiums from this semester will be archived in the future.
When there's a colloquium, come meet the speaker and have coffee & snacks at 3:30
pm in Workman 312, then attend the talk at 4 pm in Workman 101! You can also attend
via Zoom (the meeting ID is 922 7877 4516 and the pass code is 521185).
Disentangling the Crowded Cosmos
Speaker: Michael Higgins (Duke University)
Date: March 14, 2024 @ 3pm
Workman 101
Abstract: In just a few years, ground and space based telescopes will go from providing astrophysicists with hundreds of terabytes of data a year to hundreds per night. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey (TESS), a space based telescope, alone gathers around 20 terabytes of observational data a year. The Rubin Observatory will be collecting about 20 terabytes of data every night, the same data volume TESS provides in a year. These surveys collect the photometric data containing information on the physics behind core collapse supernovae, white dwarfs, gravitational lensing, cosmic shear, and the history of our universe. However, with a front row seat to the history of our universe comes the bottle-neck of how quickly we can analyze and interpret what we observe. With new surveys like the Rubin Observatory, which will be gathering petabytes of photometric data a year, and with so much data to process it is critical that tools are developed to properly analyze the data before these surveys begin collecting light from the universe. My aim is to contribute to this large data processing effort by investigating a specific source of possible data biasing related to gravitational lensing.