David Paterson chaired the meeting standing in for June Gilchrist, and introduced the guest speaker Joachim Harnois Deraps. Joachim has been working as a post -doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh for the past four years and the title of his talk was “Mapping Dark Matter with Millions of Galaxies”
However, focusing on any one particular galaxy does not reveal much about the universe at large so a 3D movie which had been generated by a powerful computer numerical simulation was shown depicting a flyby of galaxy clusters in the universe at large. This simulation flyby running faster than the speed of light served to show local and large-scale clustering of galaxies. Further simulations on a very large scale were shown which explained the idea of the cosmic web. Despite varying various parameters in these simulations, they always produce a cosmic web with filaments and voids.
Joachim also described the effects on mass on space time and the structure of galaxies and other evidence can be observed to map dark matter.
Full minutes of the talk can be downloaded via the links below
