Presentation on October 3, 8:00pm PST
in the CSM Planetarium
Speaker: Katherine Laliotis, Cosmologist, KIPAC
Illuminating the Universe Through Weak Gravitational Lensing
Free and open to the public. Free Parking in nearby lots.
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope project has successfully integrated essential components, enhancing its capability to study astronomical phenomena like dark matter and exoplanets. The project remains on track for completion in 2026, with a launch planned by May 2027. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Question: How can we learn about matter that we can’t see? Answer: By looking at how the invisible matter’s gravity affects the matter we can see. This is gravitational lensing, an exciting and active field of cosmology research through which we hope to answer fundamental questions about the universe like the nature of dark matter and dark energy. In this talk, I’ll focus on weak gravitational lensing: how it works, what It can tell us about the universe, and the prospects for up-and-coming weak lensing surveys with the Rubin Observatory and Roman Space Telescope.
Katherine Laliotis is a senior graduate student from Ohio State University, visiting KIPAC long-term. She specializes in observational cosmology, using observations of the universe to try and answer fundamental questions like “What is the universe made of?” and “How did the universe evolve?” Katherine’s research focuses on understanding and accounting for sources of systematic error for upcoming weak gravitational lensing surveys with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Vera Rubin Observatory. She also spends time thinking about how to maximize synergies between the two observatories, bringing together two different datasets to construct a uniquely broad joint survey. Katherine is passionate about connecting science to the public through outreach, education, and writing. She is a freelance science writer, covering topics at the intersection of science and society in magazines like Scientific American and Undark.
We propose a mission concept for a space observatory with a large-aperture (50-meter) unsegmented primary mirror suitable for a variety of astronomical applications. The mirror would be created in space via a novel approach based on fluidic shaping in microgravity, which has already been successfully demonstrated in a laboratory neutral buoyancy environment, in parabolic microgravity flights, and aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Theoretically scale-invariant, this technique has produced optical components with superb, sub-nanometer (RMS) surface quality.