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We are a group of undergraduate students studying at the University of California Berkeley doing Astrophysics research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under Prof. George Smoot. Our primary focus is weak gravitational lensing, although we are currently working with the Supernova Cosmology Group to determine the magnification of a few type Ia Supernova behind galaxy clusters.

Mark Wagner
Tyler Pritchard
Edgar Shaghoulian

Following is an award winning poster created for the 2007 AAS meeting in Seattle by Tyler Pritchard (left) and Mark Wagner:

"Lensing Magnification of High-Redshift Supernovae by Massive Clusters," by Mark Wagner, Tyler Pritchard, Kyle Dawson, Xiaosheng Huang, Saul Perlmutter, George Smoot, Nao Suzuki, and David Rubin. During the course of their most recent supernova search, the Supernova Cosmology Project discovered three high-redshift supernovae (very distant supernovae, which occurred early in the history of the universe) behind massive galaxy clusters. The clusters' gravity bends and intensifies the light from the supernovae, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. The authors fit theoretical models of mass, including dark matter, with the observed data from the clusters and used the resulting estimates to calculate how much gravitational lensing magnified the brightness of the supernovae, allowing excess brightness to be corrected. The goal of the project is to understand and reduce any systematic error due to weak gravitational lensing when using distant supernovae for cosmology. As increasingly distant supernovae are observed, analysis of their magnification due to gravitational lensing by foreground clusters will be of growing importance. From Today at Berkeley Lab