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David Shih: Shedding Light on Dark Matter with Modern Machine Learning and the Gaia Space Telescope

US/Pacific
    • 12:00 13:00
      Talk 1h

      Dark matter is one of the greatest enduring mysteries of fundamental physics. Despite countless direct and indirect searches for dark matter, still, the only evidence we have for it is through its gravitational effects on astrophysical and cosmological scales. In this talk, I will describe a new astrophysical technique to measure the local dark matter distribution that my collaborators and I have developed. Our technique combines modern machine learning with exquisite data on stellar kinematics from the Gaia Space Telescope and allows us to "see" the local dark matter in 3d for the first time. Along the way, our new technique also produces 3d maps of the local Galactic gravitational potential, acceleration field, and interstellar dust extinction, which are interesting in their own right and provide vital information into the structure and dynamics of the Galaxy.