Star Talk: Wednesday, February 1st
~ The Accelerating Expanding Universe ~
Join us for our next Star Talk with Dr. Bharat Ratra on Wednesday, 1st February 2023 at 6:00pm. Admission is free. The talk will be followed by night sky observation with AU right after!
đź“ŤLOCATION: AB107 (Cody hall) – 50 St. George St.
Abstract: Dark energy is the leading candidate for the mechanism that is responsible for causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Dr. Bharat Ratra will describe the astronomical data which persuade cosmologists that dark energy and dark matter are by far the main components of the energy budget of the universe at the present time. He will review how these observations have led to the development of a quantitative “standard” model of cosmology that describes the evolution of the universe from an early epoch of inflation to the complex hierarchy of structure seen today. In this non-technical talk, he will also discuss the basic physics, and the history of ideas, on which this model is based.
Biography: Dr. Ratra is a distinguished professor at Kansas State University and collaborates with the Kansas State University High Energy Physics Group. He develops models for the large-scale matter and radiation distributions in the universe. He further tests these models by comparing their predictions to observational data, including the anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the mass correlation function.
