Dr. Kyle Dawson, Department of Physics & Astronomy Presents:
From Millions of Spectra to a Cosmological Model: The Path to Science with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
In the late 1990's, measurements of distant supernovae led to the Nobel-prize winning discovery that the Universe was accelerating in its expansion due to a mysterious force known only as dark energy. In the last ten years, satellites observing the cosmic microwave background and telescopes performing wide-field optical spectroscopy have overtaken supernovae observations as the most powerful tools to explore the nature of dark energy and of the fundamental physics that govern the Universe. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), or more specifically the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopy Survey (BOSS) and its successor eBOSS, are by far the leaders in the field of spectroscopic cosmological surveys. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the questions in physics that inspired BOSS and eBOSS and I will describe the process of making those cosmological measurements from the planning stages through the final measurements. In doing so, I will provide a high-level overview of the complexities in computational and statistical modeling that we must contend with at each stage in the experiment.
