[Emeriti-faculty] Events for Thursday 2/19/09 and Friday 2/20/09

[Gayle Grant <gayle grant tufts edu>]

Good afternoon!

Events for Thursday and Friday are as follows:

Reminder:  Thursday 2/19/09 is a Monday Schedule becauseof the holiday


Thursday, February 19, 2009
Noon
Robinson 251

Dr. Eric Gawiser
Rutgers University

Informal meeting with graduate and undergraduates students.  All
students are encouraged to attend. Pizza and soda will be available.



Thursday, February 19, 2009
Robinson Hall 250, 6:00 pm
(because of President?s Day Thursday is Monday at Tufts this week !!!)
Physics Graduate Students?JOURNAL CLUB
Karla Galdamez
?Quantization Rules and the Feynman Propagator?

(undergraduate students, faculty and anyone interested are also
invited: food served at 5:30 pm in Knipp Library)


Friday, February 20, 2009
3:00 pm
Nelson Auditorium, Anderson 112

TUFTS UNIVERSITY Special Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

?Probing Dark Matter and Dark Energy with Distant Galaxies?

Eric Gawiser
Rutgers University

I will describe how our understanding of cosmological structure
formation is used to probe the amount of dark matter in high-redshift
galaxies and to identify their present-day descendants.  We studied the
spatial clustering and spectral energy distributions of Lyman Alpha
Emitting (LAE) galaxies at redshift 3.1 discovered by the MUSYC
collaboration.  The LAEs exhibit moderate clustering, which implies
median dark matter masses of 1011 solar masses.  The evolution of
galaxies' dark matter masses with redshift predicts that LAEs evolve
into typical present-day galaxies like our own Milky Way.  Other
high-redshift galaxy populations, including Lyman Break Galaxies and
Active Galactic Nuclei, typically evolve into more massive (elliptical)
galaxies.  Hence the LAEs represent our first direct knowledge of the
progenitors of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way seen when the
universe was only 2 Gyr  old.

I will also discuss the forthcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
(LSST), which will greatly expand these methods.  We will use large
samples of distant galaxies to measure the equation of state of the
dark energy through its influence on the observed scale of baryon
acoustic oscillations seen in their power spectrum.

Refreshments served in Burden Lounge, Anderson 108, at 2:30 pm.