Astronomy and Astrophysics Seminars

Strong lens modelling and the properties of dark matter

by Mr. Simon Birrer (Institute of Astronomy, ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

Monday, July 13, 2015 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at TIFR ( A269 )
Description
Strong lensing is an unique probe to measure the small scale mass distribution on scales of galaxies and below. After a short introduction in strong lensing I present a new modelling framework which allows to probe the mass distribution within a lensing galaxy down to 10^8M_{sun} and even below. This technique relies on shapelet basis functions and makes use of advanced software tools developed at ETH Zurich. Strong lensing system and the high resolution Hubble data potentially encode information about the particle nature of dark matter. The extraction of this information remains a huge computer science problem.