I hear a professor of ours, Dr. James Bullock, was touring around the Tar Heel State. (Poor guy, he has to go from worrying about having beach sand on his heels to tar. yuck!)
Anyways, I thought I would upload some videos his graduate students have made public on this website to display some things he does.
Basically he studies galaxies and other large structures to better understand a variety of things. One thing his work sheds light on is the nature of dark matter. His work has been very important into helping scientists understand how warm/cold dark matter must be to have proper large scale structure formation.
This is what I was interested in, however, I am more interested in what things like supersymmetry tells us about dark matter so the theorists won me over. However, our theorists are working with him on viable dark matter candidates so I am still very interested in his research.
Here is a numerical simulation of galaxy mergers:
Here is a numerical simulation of how galaxies form:
He gave a very good talk. It got a little technical in the middle there but for those that are familiar that particular part of astrophysics it was easy enough to follow. I would give his talk a TE (turbo encabulator) rating of 1 or maybe i.
ReplyDelete(Note on the TE scale: This comes about because of a recent talk regarding "dark flows" that was given here last week. It was completely incomprehensible (unfortunately I was not able to attend so I could not experience the incomprehensibleness). So I came up with the Turbo Encabulator scale. It is very simple, the more outrageous the number and the more outrageous or ridiculous the units the more outrageous (and incomprehensible) the talk. Therefore a TE rating of 1 means it was a good sensible and understandable talk. Another number (such as e or pi or 4!) without units means it was a good talk but more complex. A rating of i (imaginary) means it was just complex, but good. Units are always a bad thing in the TE scale. I'm still working on how to rate really bad talks. Maybe I will have to come up with the UG (undergraduate) rating system.)