Thomas Collett

I am an astrophysicist and cosmologist studying how Dark Energy is affecting the expansion of the Universe. I do this using a phenomenon called strong gravitational lensing, where the path of light from a background galaxy is bent by a massive foreground galaxy to produce multiple images of the background source. The location where the lensed images form is sensitive to the cosmological parameters and the dark matter distribution in the lens galaxy and throughout the Universe. I’m trying to probe all three with Hubble Telescope observations of lenses.

I started these projects during my PhD, which I did at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, before I came to Portsmouth in 2014.