Astronomy on Tap Santa Cruz: Searching for Runaway Supermassive Black Holes and What can DESI tell us about our Universe

**Abbott Square Market.**118 Cooper St, Santa Cruz, CA 95060

Tuesday April 15, 7:30 pm

Searching for Runaway Supermassive Black Holes

Speaker: Anavi Uppal (UCSC)

Bio: Anavi Uppal is a first-year Astronomy and Astrophysics PhD student at UCSC. She’s interested in using machine learning and telescope surveys to answer questions in extragalactic astronomy. Outside of research, she’s a freelance science journalist and loves archery and photography.

What can the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument tell us about our Universe?

Speaker: Sven Heydenreich (UCSC)

DESI has recently made big headlines with its tentative discovery that Dark Energy, an unknown and elusive force causing an acceleration in the Universe’s expansion, may be weakening. In this talk, I will explain how this discovery was made, and place it in the context of other cosmology research.

Bio: Sven Heydenreich is a postdoctoral researcher in cosmology at UCSC. He is interested in how to exploit synergies between different observations for cosmology. In his free-time he tries to explore as much of the US landscape as he can.

Free and open to people of all ages!