Cosmology with Strong Gravitational Lenses

San Franicsco Amateur Astronomers host Dr. Phil Marshall, research scientist at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIRPAC) for a presentation on Cosmology with Strong Gravitational Lenses. 

Strong gravitational lenses have become an important astronomical tool: they allow researchers to make accurate measurements of galaxy masses and constrain cosmological parameters, along with providing a magnified view of the distant universe. Dr. Marshall will discuss the potential of LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) to provide a sample of several hundred lensed quasars with well-measured time delays that would enable competitive and complementary constraints on Dark Energy, and describe ongoing investigations of how to find lenses, infer their time delays and model their mass distributions accurately, and account for weak lensing effects from external mass structures