Cosmic Dynamics in the Era of Extremely Large Telescopes - Jochen Liske, ESO

jeudi 22 mars 2007, 16:30 → 18:00 Europe/Paris

Bernard Grossetete (LPNHE)

Didier Lacour (LPNHE)

The expansion of the Universe, discovered by Hubble in 1929, remains as one of the fundamental observational cornerstones of contemporary relativistic cosmology. The sheer photon collecting power of future Extremely Large Telescopes will allow us to directly probe the history of the expansion: by observing a systematic drift of the redshifts of cosmologically distributed sources over the timescale of a few decades we will be able to map out the change of the expansion velocity as a function of cosmic epoch. This fundamental physics experiment is equally as elegant as it is observationally and technically challenging. In this talk I will describe the experiment in detail and outline an effort to devise an instrument capable of meeting the challenge: CODEX. I will also discuss the impact of the CODEX instrument on the measurement of the possible variation of the fine structure constant.