TITLE: "Observational Clues to the Evolution of Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies"

SPEAKER: Professor James A. Rose,

TIME: Thursday Apr. 11, 2002 at 4 PM

PLACE: George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)

A major goal of modern cosmology is to understand the rich variety of physical processes that connect density fluctuations arising in the early universe to the currently observed distribution of galaxies and large scale structures. Due to recent increases in computing power, it is now possible to carry out large-scale numerical simulations of the evolution of structure in the expanding universe. On the observational side, a variety of important new ground-based and space-based telescopes and instruments have been developed for characterizing the evolution of structure, both at the present epoch, and at high redshift. As a result, in the past few years an increasingly strong connection is being made between theoretical simulations of structure evolution and the actual observations. In this talk I will briefly review the current state of the simulations before describing several observational approaches for determining the evolution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies.