RFO Speaker Series: Early Universe through Cosmic Telescope, with Dr. Sreevani Jarugula, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

  • February 16, 2023 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

  • Pacific Standard Time

Ticket Price Free This event is now over
Description

Join RFO and Dr. Sreevani Jarugula, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for an informative conversation about "Early Universe through cosmic telescope."

 

How the first stars and galaxies formed and evolved to the present day Universe is an active area of research.  A powerful tool to study the conditions in the early Universe is gravitational lensing. This phenomenon occurs when a massive nearby galaxy distorts the light coming from a far away source, acting as a cosmic telescope. Several lensed galaxies have been discovered at multiple wavelengths. In this talk, Dr. Jarugula will show some of the earliest galaxies discovered through lensing in the South Pole Telescope Survey and follow up with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. She will also talk about how atomic and molecular studies give us a wealth of information on the conditions in these galaxies. The James Webb Space Telescope has observed some of these galaxies at very high resolution in near and mid infrared wavelengths which is highly complementary to the submillimeter data. With the upcoming surveys with the Vera Rubin Observatory, there will be thousands of strongly lensed galaxies that will be discovered. Machine learning techniques are actively being developed to identify and analyze these lensed galaxies in the era of big data.

 

Sreevani Jarugula is a postdoctoral research associate at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located in Batavia, Illinois. She works on developing machine learning algorithms to study Cosmology using strongly lensed galaxies. Prior to this, she worked with the South Pole Telescope Submillimeter Galaxies (SPT-SMG) collaboration where she studied early star forming lensed galaxies through molecular observations. Dr. Jarugula received her Ph.D. in 2022 from University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

 

Date & Time

Thu, Feb 16, 2023 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Robert Ferguson Observatory

The Valley of the Moon Observatory Association (VMOA) is volunteer amateur and professional astronomers plus a small supporting staff organized as a nonprofit association to provide educational programs about science and astronomy for students, the public, and in support of educators.

The VMOA is responsible for the construction, maintenance and utilization of the Robert Ferguson Observatory and functions as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization under the auspices of the California State Parks System, and in cooperation with our local state parks.