Matteo Maturi How Can We Find the Cause of the Accelerated Expansion of the Universe?
Matteo Maturi is permanent staff member at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at Heidelberg University. He also collaborates with the Euclid Consortium, which has the single scientific responsibility for ESA’s Euclid mission. He has worked on the implementation of the ‘Adaptive Identifier for Clustered Objects’ and as co-coordinator of the ‘Weak Lensing Selected Clusters’ for the Consortium. Currently, his research interests include galaxy clusters and cosmology, gravitational lensing, the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect and signal extraction with filtering techniques.
Area of Research
Theoretical Astrophysics
since 2015
Permanent Staff Member
Heidelberg University (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg)
Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics
2006-2014
Post-Doc
Heidelberg University (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg)
Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics
2006
Post-Doc
Max Planck Society
Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
2006
PhD in Astronomy (Joint Program with the University of Padova)
Heidelberg University (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg)
2002
Degree in Astronomy
Padova University
1997
Diploma
Istituti Filippin
Fellowships
- EARA Fellowship to Be Spent at Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik (2005)
- EARA Fellowship to Be Spent at Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik (2003)
Galaxies keep drifting apart from one another. This is because the universe is expanding in an accelerated way. It is mostly composed of matter and thus the acceleration should slow down because matter carries gravity and gravity is a force which pulls, but does not push, if one neglects the cosmological constant. This is not the case and it is currently assumed that this accelerated expansion is caused by dark energy. MATTEO MATURI and his research group investigate the cause of this phenomenon. As he describes in this video, they approached the problem by observing galaxy clusters with optical telescopes. Once they find clusters, they can use them to trace the evolution of these cosmic structures. The researchers have already applied their method to existing data and managed to find 1800 clusters. They are in the process of implementing their method in the pipeline of the Euclid Space Mission and hope to obtain a better understanding of accelerated expansion and of dark energy if this indeed turns out to be its cause.
LT Video Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.21036/LTPUB10444
Searching for Galaxy Clusters in the Kilo-Degree Survey
- Mario Radovich, Emanuella Puddu, Fabio Bellagamba, Mauro Roncarelli, Lauro Moscardini, Sandro Bardelli, Aniello Grado, Fedor Getman, Matteo Maturi and Zhenghua Huang
- arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.02954
- Published in 2017
AMICO: Optimised Detection of Galaxy Clusters in Photometric Surveys
- Fabio Bellagamba, Mauro Roncarelli, Matteo Maturi and Lauro Moscardini
- arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.03029
- Published in 2017
