Physics Graduate Student Seminar with Bryce Wedig on Investigating Dark Matter Substructure with Gravitational Lensing

When two galaxies line up along our line of sight, light from the distant galaxy is gravitationally lensed around the closer galaxy which can form distorted arcs of light around it. This rare and beautiful phenomenon can help us answer some of the biggest questions in cosmology, like what dark matter is and the value of the Hubble constant. I’ll talk about how analyzing images of galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lens systems can constrain dark matter theories and test the Lambda-CDM cosmological model at small scales by saying something about dark matter substructure in galaxies. Investigating Dark Matter Substructure with Gravitational Lensing