| Project/Area Number |
20K14511
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Review Section |
Basic Section 16010:Astronomy-related
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo (2020, 2023)
National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (2021-2022) |
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Principal Investigator |
WONG Kenneth 東京大学, 大学院理学系研究科(理学部), 特任助教 (00794207)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2020-04-01 – 2024-03-31
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| Project Status |
Completed (Fiscal Year 2023)
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| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,470,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥570,000)
Fiscal Year 2021: ¥1,170,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥270,000)
Fiscal Year 2020: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000、Indirect Cost: ¥300,000)
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| Keywords | cosmology / gravitational lensing / extragalactic astronomy / astrophysics |
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| Outline of Research at the Start |
My research uses strong gravitational lensing, a phenomenon where the gravity of a massive galaxy creates multiple images of a background object, to measure the expansion rate of the Universe. There is a growing discrepancy between different measurements of this expansion rate, depending on whether the measurement comes from observations of the early Universe (just after the Big Bang) or the late Universe (closer to the present time). Gravitational lensing provides an independent late-Universe measurement, and thus is a crucial test of whether this discrepancy may lead to new physics.
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
My research primarily focuses on using strong gravitational lensing (the deflection of light rays by gravity) to study the physical properties of our Universe. By using strongly-lensed images of distant quasars, I worked to constrain the expansion rate of the Universe. This value, called the "Hubble constant", is highly debated, and has important implications for our understanding of physics. I have been working as part of the TDCOSMO collaboration, which has provided the most precise measurement of the Hubble constant using strong gravitational lensing to date. In addition, I have been a leader of the strong lensing working group for the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam survey. This large imaging survey provides a great opportunity to search for new strong lenses for a variety of science goals. I have worked on lens searches in the HSC survey using both traditional algorithms and new machine-learning approaches, helping to discover hundreds of new gravitational lenses.
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| Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements |
The expansion rate of the Universe has major implications for its age, energy content, and future. My research using gravitational lensing to calculate the expansion rate provides a key independent measurement to check for error in other methods, which have been in tension with each other.
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