DFG award for astrophysicist Julia Stadler

Astrophysicist Dr. Julia Stadler is founding a new research group at LMU’s University Observatory Munich. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has awarded her undertaking around 1.6 million euros in funding through its Emmy Noether Programme.

In her research, Julia Stadler analyzes the Cosmic Large Scale Structure reflected in the distribution of galaxies. Although these structures are measured very precisely by state-of-the-art telescopes and can contribute to a whole new understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, fully unlocking the scientific potential of the data has proved challenging.

The team led by Julia Stadler plans to establish a novel method of data analysis that allows conclusions to be drawn with very high precision and accuracy. Her approach is based on a computational model that reproduces the spatial development of large-scale cosmological structures from the time shortly after the Big Bang to their observation by humans. This model permits a three-dimensional comparison of the simulated structures against the spatially measured observational data.

As conceptual studies, including her own, have demonstrated the potential of such an approach, the team will elaborate the technology and apply it to state-of-the-art observational datasets. In doing so, the team will combine perturbative methods with the precise consideration of observation-related biases and verify the results against numerical simulations. With modern methods from the fields of statistics and machine learning, the researchers want to unlock the full scientific potential of the data and thus render new cosmological discoveries possible.