András Kovács: Much Ado About Nothing: Cosmic Voids

Wednesday 21 Jan 2015, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Madrid

Seminar (IFAE)

Galaxies and their dark matter halos populate a complicated filamentary network around large regions that are almost empty, so-called voids. In addition, objects called supervoids mark out regions devoid of superclusters of galaxies. These vast cosmic structures are rich sources of information for both astrophysics and cosmology, as they are the most sensitive to the accelerating expansion governed by the mysterious dark energy. In this talk, I give an introduction to the state-of-the-art void science in general, and particularize the higher-than-expected cold imprint of voids in the Cosmic Microwave Background, i.e. a real challenge for Lambda-CDM cosmology.