ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIUM - MARCH 28, 2006
Gary Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania
Handicapping the Dark Energy Derby
Many different approaches and projects have been proposed to seek the
cause of the acceleration of the Hubble expansion. I will describe a
new formalism for forecasting the performance of one of these
methods, weak gravitational lensing, which unifies the treatment of
statistical, systematic, and theory uncertainties. Then I will
compare the dark-energy constraints from different methods, such as
high-redshift supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations, and cluster
counting, and see how these might combine to improve our future
understanding of the acceleration phenomenon.