Title:

Lighting Up the Dark: Connecting Galaxies To Mass



Risa Wechsler
Stanford



Abstract:

Many of the most vital questions in cosmology require a detailed  
understanding of a simple question: How does mass connect to light?  
Making this connection, often described by the galaxy "bias", is  
essential both to use galaxy clustering to constrain cosmological  
models and the nature of dark energy, and to develop a physical  
understanding of the origin of galaxy properties and their  
correlations. I will describe several advances towards making this  
connection, which combine the results of numerical simulations with  
observations of galaxy clustering and of galaxy clusters.  I will  
show how these results provide an explanation for the observed  
luminosity, scale, and redshift dependence of galaxy clustering, and  
also how they may improve the use of galaxies as cosmological tools.