Physics Colloquium: Alyson Brooks

Please join the Physics Department in welcoming Dr. Alyson Brooks from Rutgers University, who will be giving a talk entitled:

Solving Cold Dark Matter's Small Scale Crisis

The talk will be preceded by an informal tea in the Hugel lobby at 4:10PM.

A cosmological model in which the Universe is dominated by cold dark matter (CDM) and dark energy has been hugely successful in describing the observed evolution and large scale structure of our Universe.  However, at small scales (in the smallest galaxies and at the centers of larger galaxies), a number of observations seem to conflict with the predictions of CDM galaxy formation theory. These small scales, though, are also regions dominated by gas and stars. The more complex physics of gas and stars makes them more difficult to model. I will show results from high resolution cosmological galaxy simulations that include gas, stars, and dark matter to show that the physics of ordinary matter can significantly alter the dark matter structure of galaxies, revolutionizing our expectations for galaxy structure.