Burcin Mutlu-Pakdil Colloquium

Fri. Mar. 18 12:30 PM - Fri. Mar. 18 01:20 PM
Contact: Andrea Wiebe
Location: via Zoom

Burcin Mutlu-Pakdil

NSF & KICP Fellow

Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago

The Smallest and Faintest Galaxies: Clues to the Nature of Dark Matter and Galaxy Formation

The smallest and faintest galaxies around the Milky Way are the most ancient, most metal-poor, and most dark-matter-dominated systems known. These extreme objects offer unique access to small scales where the stellar and dark matter content can be studied simultaneously. They hold the promise of major breakthroughs in understanding the nature of dark matter and a more complete picture of galaxy formation. Thus, their discovery and characterization are among the most important goals in the field. In this talk, I will share our ongoing observational efforts to detect these faint systems around the Milky Way and beyond, and upcoming advances in the era of deep and wide imaging instrumentation, with a focus on their implications.

BIO: Burçin is currently an NSF & KICP Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. She uses observations of nearby galaxies to study the smallest dark matter halos, and how they get populated with stars. She has been honored as a 2018 Ted Fellow and 2020 TED Senior Fellow, featured in National Geographic as a “woman of impact”, named a 2019 AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador (an award meant to increase the visibility of women leaders in STEM careers on the national stage), and featured in a Science Friday film documentary, “Breakthrough: Portraits Of Women In Science”. 

 

For a zoom invitation to this event, please contact Andrea Wiebe at an.wiebe@uwinnipeg.ca.