Hendrik Hildebrandt
Argelander-Institut für Astronomie

Abstract
Gravitational lensing represents a unique tool to study the dark Universe. In the weak lensing regime small distortions in the images of galaxies caused by the large-scale structure can be detected over the whole sky. Measuring these coherent distortions yields cosmological insights complementary to other probes like the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Ongoing wide-field imaging surveys exploit this to come up with competitive constraints on important cosmological parameters. In this seminar talk I will concentrate on recent results from the ongoing European Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) and show a mild tension of these results with CMB measurements from the Planck mission.
Possible future developments will be discussed that could help make cosmic shear measurements even more robust and lead to an answer to the question whether this tension is real or not. I will conclude with an outlook towards future missions like Euclid, LSST, and WFIRST.

2017 March 28, 15:00

IA/U.Lisboa
Observatório Astronómico de Lisboa (Seminar room)
Tapada da Ajuda, 1349-018 Lisboa