Brown University
Date:
I was invited to give a talk at Brown University, Providence, RI, for the Astrophysics and Cosmology group, but due to the pandemic, it got moved to a zoom talk instead. I presented a talk on how to use galaxy clusters as cosmological probes and focused on the recent papers https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.07664.pdf and https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04414.pdf.
abstract
Many different astronomical observations have revealed the strange nature of the Universe, which requires more than baryonic matter and baryonic physics to be explained. A cosmological model with dark matter and dark energy is currently favoured, but there is no physical explanation yet for the dark components of the Universe. A promising tool to study these components in more detail is the measuring of the growth of galaxy clusters through cosmic time. For these cluster cosmology studies accurate mass measurements of the total mass of clusters are the main limitation. Weak gravitational lensing measurements can provide mass estimates, but sources of systematic uncertainty have to be controlled to percent level in order to tighten cosmological constraints. I will review how galaxy clusters can be cosmological probes and discuss the challenges for gravitational lensing measurements of galaxy clusters and some of the latest results.