Listening to the shape of the Universe

Speaker: Rossana Ruggeri
Affiliation: Queensland University of Technology

Abstract

Over five years, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will collect the light from nearly 40 million galaxies and quasars across one-third of the sky, mapping the Universe expansion history up to 11 billion light-years. Recently, our DESI team measured the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature across seven different distance ranges using data from the first year of observations. In this talk, I will explain these BAO measurements and what they tell us about the universe. In particular, I will discuss how they help us understand the Hubble constant, dark energy, the shape of the universe, and the total mass of neutrinos.

Bio: Dr. Rossana Ruggeri is an astrophysicist whose research focuses on cosmology and understanding our dark Universe, mostly using tools called ‘large scale structure’ and ‘weak gravitational lensing’. At present, she co-coordinates a large team within the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument – a top international collaboration. After growing up in Italy, Rossana obtained her PhD at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (UK) and then took research positions at Swinburne University and the University of Queensland, where she recently won a DECRA fellowship. During her doctorate thesis, she led science with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, one of the major astronomy projects that has spurred advancement in answering a range of fundamental questions about the origins of the universe. She is now a lecturer in astrophysics at QUT.