The Physics department colloquia are usually on Friday afternoons at 3 pm in Room 135. Coffee and cookies are served at 2:45 pm in the same room. Anyone is welcome.

LSST: Physicists and Astronomers of the World, Unite!
Dr. Željko Ivezić, Professor of Astronomy/LSST Project Scientist, University of Washington

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be the most comprehensive optical sky survey project ever undertaken. LSST will take panoramic images of the entire sky twice each week for 10 years, resulting in what can be called “the greatest movie of all time.” The resulting hundreds of petabytes of imaging data for close to 40 billion objects will be used for investigations ranging from cataloging dangerous near-Earth asteroids to fundamental physics such as characterization of dark matter and dark energy.

I will overview LSST science drivers and system design and then discuss the main methods for studying Dark Universe. As an illustration of related ongoing work, I will describe determination of the Milky Way dark matter halo properties using data obtained by SDSS. I will also briefly comment on how to efficiently prepare our students to be ready for this Big Data era.