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June 1, 2021

A Dark Matter map of our Local Cosmic Neighborhood

A Dark Matter map of our Local Cosmic Neighborhood

Using cutting-edge machine-learning techniques, a team of Korean-American astrophysicists was able to produce the most detailed map yet of the local Universe that shows what the cosmic web looks like. The team responsible for this breakthrough was led by senior researcher Sungwook E. Hong from the University of Seoul and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). He was joined by associate professor Donghui Jeong of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos (IGS) at Penn State, and researchers Ho Seong Hwang and Juhan Kim of Seoul National University and the Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), respectively.

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About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.