Natalie Roe
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Monday, October 18, 2010
4:00 p.m.
Cardwell 102
A Cosmological Ruler for Dark Energy
The problem of measuring distances in astronomy has been a challenge to generations of astronomers. A promising new technique called baryon acoustic oscillations measure the ripples in the distribution of matter that were imprinted when the universe was still a hot, dense plasma. I will describe an experiment to measure these so-called baryon acoustic oscillations called BOSS - Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. BOSS has just completed the first year of a planned five year survey at the Sloan telescope in Apache Point, New Mexico. I will also mention a follow-on next generation project called BigBOSS.