Faculty seminar: Rein van de Weijgaert (Professor of Astronomy; Groningen, Netherlands)
Abstract on scales of a few up to a hundred Megaparsec, galaxies and matter have aggregated into an intriguing wispy weblike structure, consisting of dense compact clusters, elongated filaments, and sheetlike walls, surrounding large near-empty void regions.
Professor Weijgaert will review the large advances that have been made in mapping this cosmic web and in understanding its formation, evolution and dynamics. In some detail, we will discuss recent advances in modeling the evolving structure of the cosmic web in different cosmologies, in which we use geometric tools to solve an analytical approximation for the weblike density field. It allows a systematic assessment of the prominence and spectrum of dense halos, filaments, walls and voids. Subsequently, we will look into the phase space structure of the emerging weblike features, following recent promising developments that have opened up the path towards an accurate resolution of individual matter streams.
Finally, we will use the multiscale Nexus tool for looking into alignments of galaxy spins with their parent filaments.
Date: Thursday 28 February
Time: 6pm, 5.30pm pre-lecture refreshments
Location: Ketley room, building 54, Highfield Campus