Weak lensing analysis of wide field surveys

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Dark matter constitutes 70% of the mass present in the Universe, this fact has been confirmed independently by many observations over the past 10 years. The nature of dark matter is still unknown, and one of the keys to this problem lies in the way dark matter is distributed in the Universe, and how galaxies form within dark matter haloes. This project is to investigate the distribution of Dark Matter using a technique called weak gravitational lensing. It uses the measured distorted shape of distant galaxies caused by space time warps and curves due to the presence of matter along the line-of-sight. The distortion is a direct estimator of the amount of dark matter projected along the line-of-sight. My research team will work on the Next Generation Virgo Survey, which is a recently approved Large Program at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope. The observations will take 771 hours on the telescope observing time over the next three years. The proposed research will lead to, but is not limited to, the discovery of very distant new clusters of galaxies, a detailed analysis of the dark matter haloes shapes and distribution as function of distance from us, a much better understanding of the galaxy formation process in their host dark matter halo using the nearby galaxies from the Virgo cluster.