BSTRACT

The nature of dark matter and dark energy is one of the most important open questions in cosmology today. This talk will describe how measurements of weak gravitational lensing of galaxies can be used to study these mysterious ingredients of the universe, and present results from the Kilo-Degree Survey that is on-going at the VLT Survey Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

BIO
Koen Kuijken is professor of astronomy at Leiden Observatory, the astronomy department of the Leiden University Science Faculty. His research has focused on mapping dark matter, particularly using stellar dynamics and gravitational lensing. He headed the consortium that built the 300-Megapixel CCD mosaic camera for the VLT Survey Telescope, and is principal investigator of the largest survey on that telescope, the Kilo-Degree Survey.
He obtained his PhD at Cambridge University in 1988, and before arriving in Leiden in 2002 he held a postdoc position at CITA (Toronto), a Hubble fellowship at Harvard, and a senior lectureship at the university of Groningen.