Friday, June 14 at 7:30 p.m.

David Pecker Conference Room, WIllcox Hall, Pace University, Pleasantville, NY or via ZOOM (link on home page.

Solving the Missing Baryon Problem with Fast Radio Bursts

Isabel Medlock
Department of Astronomy, Yale University

Recently discovered fast radio bursts, milliseconds long, extremely energetic radio pulses of mysterious origins, are not only fascinating phenomena in themselves but also exciting as a tool to answer astrophysical and cosmological questions about the nature of our universe. In this talk, I will review the discovery and history of fast radio bursts and their potential as cosmological probes. In particular, fast radio bursts are a potential path to resolving the missing baryon problem, the discrepancy between the baryons we observe in the universe and the amount predicted by Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background. I will highlight the discoveries already made and the promising future possibilities with the advent of facilities like CHIME and DSA-2000 which will discover and localize tens of thousands of FRBs per year.

I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate at the Astronomy Department at Yale University working with Prof. Daisuke Nagai. I was born and raised in Philadelphia, where I attended a Spanish Immersion elementary and middle school and a project-based high school. In May of 2021, I graduated with honors from Princeton University with a B.A. in Astrophysics and minors in Computer Science and Russian Language and Culture. I matriculated to the Yale University Astronomy Department in the Fall of 2021 to pursue my PhD in Astrophysics. My research interests broadly lay in computational cosmology. Specifically, I am interested in a wide range of topics including fast radio bursts, the circumgalactic medium, feedback in hydrodynamical simulations, and cold streams that feed star-forming high-z galaxies. Outside of research, I am passionate about increasing the accessibility of astronomy in the Latinx community.

Free & open to the public.