SF Amateur Astronomers Lecture Series | How the Galaxy Formed

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join Risa Wechsler (Stanford University) for a presentation on Galaxy Formation in a Dark Universe. Wechsler will discuss our current understanding of how galaxies form, and how these observations can be used to shed light on the physics of the Universe.

Recent cosmological measurements indicate that a mere four percent of the contents of the Universe is made up of stars, gas, and the normal stuff we interact with every day. An unobserved substance called dark matter dominates the mass in the Universe. In this talk, Wechsler explains how this dark matter and dark energy determine the fate of galaxies.

Risa Wechsler is a cosmologist, an Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford and at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and a member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. Her work primarily focuses on the formation of cosmological structure, from the scales of the smallest galaxies to the largest scales in the Universe. She is a former Hubble Fellow, Fermi Fellow, and Kavli Fellow, and has received a Terman Fellowship and Hellman Fellowship for her research at Stanford.

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