Hunting for Dark Matter Using Galaxy Quakes

Dark matter is believed to pervade our universe, but there are few ways to find and understand this mysterious stuff that does not emit any light. I will review how the astronomical community first inferred the existence of dark matter and the current methods used to search for it. My own work in understanding dark matter is similar to the hunt for planets in the 1800s. I use a dynamical analysis to infer properties of dark-matter dominated dwarf galaxies
from studying the gravitational tides they raise on galactic disks. We now have evidence that this method, that we call Galactoseismology (or analyzing Galaxy quakes), gives us a new way to hunt for the darkest galaxies and understand how dark matter is distributed in galaxies like our own.

Speaker: Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti, Rochester Institute of Technology