[AANC Contacts] "Dark Secrets: The Hidden Universe" in Berkeley Oct. 26

[Andrew Fraknoi]

Dark Secrets: What Science Tells us About the Hidden Universe
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A free panel discussion open to the public.

Part of Berkeley Lab’s "Science at the Theater" Series

When: Monday, October 26, 7 pm - 8:30 pm

Where: Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley, CA

For more information, see: http://www.lbl.gov/Community/

For directions, see: http://www.berkeleyrep.org/planyourvisit/index.asp

No mystery is bigger than dark energy ­- the 
elusive force that makes up three-quarters of the 
Universe and is causing it to expand at an 
accelerating rate.  KTVU Channel 2 health and 
science editor John Fowler will moderate a panel 
of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 
scientists who use phenomena such as exploding 
stars and gravitational lenses to explore the dark cosmos.

Panelists:

Saul Perlmutter heads the Supernova Cosmology 
Project, which pioneered the use of precise 
observations of exploding stars to study the 
expansion of the Universe. His international team 
was one of two groups who independently 
discovered the amazing phenomenon known as dark 
energy, and he led a collaboration that designed 
a satellite to study the nature of this dark 
force. He is an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab 
and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley.

David Schlegel is a Berkeley Lab astrophysicist 
and the principal investigator of Baryon 
Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), the 
largest of four night-sky surveys being conducted 
in the third phase of the Sloan Digital Sky 
Survey, known as SDSS-III. BOSS will generate a 
3-D map of two million galaxies and quasars, 
using a specially built instrument outfitted with 
1,000 optical fibers and mounted on the SDSS telescope in New Mexico.

Alexie Leauthaud is Chamberlain Fellow at 
Berkeley Lab who received her Ph.D in 
astrophysics from LAM in France in 2007.  Her 
work probes dark matter in the Universe using a 
technique called gravitational lensing.  When 
gravity from a massive object such as a cluster 
of galaxies warps space around it, this can 
distort our view of the light from an even more 
distant object.  The scale and direction of this 
distortion allows astronomers to directly measure 
the properties of both dark matter and dark energy.