CCA Seminar Series: Camille Avestruz

Name: CCA Seminar Series: Camille Avestruz
Start: 2018-02-22T15:30:00-05:00
End: 2018-02-22T16:30:00-05:00

Thursday February 22, 2018

Title: Computationally Probing Large Scale Structures
Abstract: As understood today, the history of our universe can be described with six parameters. We can constrain these parameters by measuring patterns in the large scale structure of our universe, which are governed by the competition between gravitational collapse and the accelerated expansion of our universe. The most massive collapsed structures are clusters of galaxies, comprised of hundreds to thousands of galaxies. For galaxy clusters, the telltale cosmological pattern is simply their number count as a function of mass and time. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges in using galaxy clusters as a probe for cosmology. We address these challenges through computational methods that explore galaxy formation processes such as energy feedback from active galactic nuclei, synthetic observations of the superheated plasma that permeates galaxy clusters, and methods that automate aspects of pattern-recognition.

If you are interested in attending, please contact [email protected] at least 24 hrs in advance to be added to the guest list.

About the Speaker

Camille Avestruz is a joint KICP and Fermi Postdoctoral Fellow at theUniversity of Chicago. From 2015 to 2017, she held a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholarship at the University of Chicago. Avestruz uses simulations to understand observations of massive objects that trace the large-scale structure in our universe. Her interests include galaxy clusters and gravitational lensing as probes of large scale structure, hydro dynamical simulations and machine learning as tools for study, and various connections to multi-wavelength observations.