***********************************************************
OATS-UNI/TS SEMINAR
***********************************************************
Speaker: Rudy Gilmore (SISSA - Trieste)

Title: Modeling and Measurement of Cosmic Background Radiation
Date: Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Time: 15:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni
***********************************************************
Abstract: Understanding how the population of photons emitted by galaxies at UV to IR wavelengths evolves over cosmological time requires modeling of the galaxy population. While large-scale galaxy surveys by experiments such as GALEX, HST, Spitzer, and Herschel over the last decade have greatly increased our understanding of how the galaxy population evolves from high redshift to the local universe, there are still major uncertainties in the buildup of this photon signal, which we observe today as the extragalactic background light (EBL). I will present predictions from recent semi-analytic models that trace the growth of galaxies, and compare against results obtained with other techniques and multiwavelength data. Electron-positron pair-production interactions between background photons and high energy GeV and TeV gamma-rays affect extragalactic observations of high-energy sources. I will describe this link between galaxy formation and high-energy astrophysics and show how ongoing and upcoming gamma-ray experiments can be used to constrain the EBL by observing distant blazars and gamma-ray bursts.
***********************************************************
Contact: Stefano Borgani (DAUT)