Video: DDO Astronomy Night: Weighing the Universe with a Balloon-Borne Telescope with Mohamed Shaaban

Speaker: Mohamed Shaaban, PhD candidate, University of Toronto

Not only is the Universe expanding, but it’s also accelerating! This revelation implies either our understanding of gravity is flawed or that a mysterious negative pressure known as Dark Energy is driving the expansion. It turns out that the contents of the universe can be divided into three groups: dark energy, dark matter and the matter that is everything we can see and interact with, which only accounts for 5% of the universe!
 
One way to understand the relationship between these three groups is to find out how heavy they are! Unfortunately, there are no universe-sized scales so instead we have to build an experiment to weigh the universe for us! Mohamed Shaaban talks about this exact experiment, the SuperBIT, which is a UofT-led collaboration with Princeton U, Durham U, NASA JPL, and the CSA.

Opening Video: 5:00
Introduction: 6:10
Main Presentation: 8:18
Questions: 32:40