Public Lecture – The Search for Dark Matter
Thanks to Thembela Mantungwa of the South African Astronomical Observatory for this notice:
Dr. Andreas Faltenbacher, a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Western Cape, will be giving a free public talk at S.A. Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town this Saturday, May 26 at 20h00. The title of his talk is “The search for dark matter”. After the talk, there will be tours of the main building, the McClean Telescope and stargazing if the weather is good.
Summary of the talk:
The currently favoured cosmological standard model implies that more than 80% of all gravitational matter in the universe is invisible. Up to today, however, the basic properties of this ‘dark matter’ remain rather elusive.
In his talk, Dr. Faltenbacher will address the following questions:
1) Why do we need such a mysterious thing ?
2) What dark matter candidates have been suggested ?
3) Which dark matter candidates have already been excluded by current observations?
Bio:
Dr. Andreas Faltenbacher is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Western Cape. He is among the team that is working on preparations for the South African Square Kilometre Array (SKA). He obtained his PhD at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His PhD thesis was about numerical work on the large scale structure of the universe. He did research at various astronomical institutions around the world, places like, Jerusalem, Santa Cruz, Shanghai and Munich.