Kasey Thai
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Minh Nguyen
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics, Physics Department / LSA
Program:
Authors: Minh Nguyen
Session: Session 6: 3:40 pm – 4:30 pm
Poster: 39
Abstract
Dark matter (DM) constitutes the bulk of matter and mass in our universe. It however emits no light or radiation, thus remains elusive to direct observation and detection. Astronomers and cosmologists instead reconstruct the distribution of DM, for example, from the distribution of galaxies. These reconstructions potentially suffer from contaminations from Galactic dust emission, i.e. radiation emitted by dust within our Milky Way. Such contaminations can bias the reconstructions if not accounted for. We examine a recently reconstructed map of DM (hereafter DM map) and measure its cross-correlation with a novel map of Galactic dust. The correlation between these two maps (if any) provides a direct assessment for (potential) dust contaminations, i.e. systematics, in the DM map.
