Astronomy Tea Talk

Weak gravitational lensing, whereby the images of background galaxies are distorted by foreground matter, can be a powerful cosmological probe if systematics are sufficiently controlled. In particular, I will show how we may use weak lensing to robustly test the standard cosmological constant-dominated "concordance model" by using in-hand expansion history data to make predictions for future observations. Using this methodology I will show how various theoretical and observational uncertainties impact our ability to possibly falsify the standard model with Euclid weak lensing data, thereby exploring the effects of dynamical dark energy, warm dark matter, baryonic physics, and additional neutrino species.