Sarah Pearson to join DARK
After spending 10 years abroad obtaining her PhD in astronomy from Columbia University in the City of New York and holding two prestigious fellowships in the US: the Flatiron Research Fellowship and the NASA Hubble Fellowship, Sarah Pearson is returning to the Niels Bohr Institute to start her own group as a Villum Young Investigator at DARK.
Sarah was awarded DKK 8 million by the Villum Foundation to fund her research program and to hire two PhD students.
The title of Sarah's research program is: "Decoding Dark Matter - with Stellar Streams Beyond the Milky Way".
Dark matter makes up more than 80% of the matter in the Universe, but we still do not know what dark matter is.
Sarah will use stellar streams around other galaxies as astrophysical tools to decipher the nature of dark matter.
Stellar streams form when tidal forces from those galaxies tear smaller systems apart into thin structures, and stellar streams are sensitive to both the distribution and degree of clumping of dark matter.