From ideal to real observational cosmology

I am happy that my essay "Observables of super-extremal black holes: challenging Cosmic Censorship to comprehend the Cosmological Constant" was awarded a honourable mention in this year's Gravity Research Foundation Essay Contest. A preprint version of the essay can be found at arxiv:2405.08057 .

  We are happy that our recent paper on Abell 3827 got news coverage!  Most work was done by our great student Joyce Lin from Carnegie Mellon now at Madison-Wisconsin. MNRAS made our paper freely available, available here , and phys.org wrote a nice public article about it,  available here . 

Just wanted to share that I got a Wikipedia entry in English & German: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Wagner https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Wagner_(Physikerin) Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

What is the purpose of fundamental science? In my eyes to create a deeper understanding of Nature, to explore relations between phenomena in any possible way that yields new insights. On top, there are other issues to be taken into account, namely, can we afford to do this in the face of more pressing needs, for instance, looking at the increasing demands and costs in energy, and do we provide respectable (living) conditions for people doing research in academia to foster true progress and value the life time people invest in this quest? Here are answers I discovered on my journey.    The astrophysical methods my colleagues and I have developed and tried to establish meet the first two criteria and I am very proud and happy that, even after 100 years of modern cosmology, big advancements can still be made in theory and methodology to increase our knowledge and save resources at the same time. Apart from that, the power of mathematics and human understanding allows us to delineate the s

The news and blog website " Cosmo of '69 " has just been launched! Everybody who wants to contribute with blog entries about their latest results is most welcome. Thanks a lot to my colleagues Eoin Ó Colgáin, Stephen Appleby, and Shahin Sheikh-Jabbari for making this possible.  We also opened a Twitter account to disseminate further news on recent findings that test the fundamental principles of our cosmological concordance model. 

Double galaxy mystifies Hubble astronomers Gazing into the universe is like looking into a funhouse mirror. That's because gravity warps the fabric of space, creating optical illusions. Many of these optical illusions appear when a distant galaxy's light is magnified, stretched, and brightened as it passes through a massive galaxy or galaxy cluster in front of it. This phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, produces multiple, stretched, and brightened images of the background galaxy. This phenomenon allows astronomers to study galaxies so distant they cannot be seen other than by the effects of gravitational lensing. The challenge is in trying to reconstruct the distant galaxies from the odd shapes produced by lensing. But astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope stumbled upon one such odd shape while analyzing quasars, the blazing cores of active galaxies. They spotted two bright, linear objects that appeared to be mirror images of each other. Another oddball object was

The Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg awarded me the Prize for Courageous Science for "proving to take high risks from the beginning of her the career onwards while working between different research fields -- from her start in particle physics to her PhD in life sciences and to her work in cosmology."  More information can be found on the homepage of the ministry (German). 

My essay ''Self-gravitating dark matter gets in shape'' was awarded a honorable mention in the Gravity Research Foundation Essay Contest 2020.  The award announcements can be found here .  The entire essay is available on arXiv as arXiv:2005.08975 or as an invited publication in IJPM D Vol 29 (2020) .