The Solar System Zoo: a lecture with UPENN Professor Gary Bernstein

Learn why the question “How many planets are there?” is more complicated than it seems in this fun and informative presentation.

Professor Bernstein’s research centers on extracting gems of astronomical knowledge from large piles of astronomical images. Currently his group is pursuing two main science projects with the ~100,000 sky exposures of the Dark Energy Survey.

Gravitational lensing is the deflection of light by gravity as predicted by General Relativity. These deflections can cause dramatic distortions of background objects, or subtle changes in shape known as weak lensing. By measuring statistical correlations among the shapes of hundreds of millions of galaxies in the DES, we can measure the properties of dark matter and dark energy, which do not emit or absorb any light of their own.

Professor Bernstein and collaborators are also searching the DES images for solar system members orbiting beyond Neptune, a.k.a. trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). These thousands of small icy bodies are remnants of the early phases of the formation of our Solar System and give clues to the dramatic rearrangements of the giant planets that occurred early on.