Caught in the Cosmic Web
Saturday, July 9, 2022, 7:00 pm
Dr. Geller’s talk, “Caught in the Cosmic Web”, and will describe her adventures in mapping the universe throughout her career. She will discuss the initial discovery of the cosmic web and the HectoMAP project that she is now leading to survey the middle-aged universe. This survey uses data from two of the largest telescopes available to provide the redshift and other spectroscopic data to determine distances to more than 100,000 galaxies. Dr. Geller show how we use these studies to understand structure in the universe and to lay the foundation for future even larger maps extending deeper into the universe.
Biography
Margaret J. Geller is a pioneer in mapping the large scale structure of the universe. Her maps have provided a new view of the enormous patterns in the distribution of galaxies like the Milky Way --- the largest patterns we know.
Dr. Geller's long-range scientific goals are to discover what the universe looks like and to understand how it came to have the rich patterns we observe today. To put the pieces of this grand puzzle together her research projects range from the structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, to mapping the distribution of the mysterious, ubiquitous dark matter in the universe.
Dr. Geller's current main research interests are:
- Mapping the distribution of the mysterious, ubiquitous dark matter in the universe.
- Mapping the middle-aged universe to understand how clusters and large-scale structure evolve. She leads a project called HectoMAP.
- Combining redshift surveys and weak lensing to understand how galaxies trace the dark matter in the universe
Dr. Geller completed her Bachelor’s degree in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, and her Ph.D. in Physics at Princeton in 1974. Dr. Geller is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. Other include the Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the Klopsteg Memorial Award, the James Craig Watson medal, the Russell Lectureship, the Lilienfeld Prize, the Magellanic Premium, the Karl Schwarzschild Medal, the Library Lion of the New York Public Library, and seven honorary degrees.
