Dr Yabebal Tadesse Fantaye from AIMS will present the NASSP colloquium with a talk entitled, "Is the Universe Isotropic?"
 

The two fundamental assumptions in cosmology are that the Universe is statistically homogeneous and isotropic when averaged on large scales. Given the big implication of these assumptions, there has been a lot of statistical tests carried out to verify the validity. Since the first high-precision Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data release by the WMAP satellite, many anomalies that challenges the isotropy assumption, including dipolar power asymmetry on large angular scales, have been reported. In this talk I will present the status of different statistical tests of cosmic isotropy from the Planck experiment.

Yabebal Tadesse Fantaye was born and educated in Ethiopia. He did his undergraduate in the department of Physics at Addis Ababa University. He completed his Honours and Masters in the University of Cape Town in the National Astrophysics and Space Science Program. After that he moved to Italy, Trieste, where he completed his PhD. He held two postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in the University of Oslo, Norway, and at the department of Mathematics in the University of Tor Vergata Rome, Italy. Currently he is the ARETE-AIMS Junior Research Chair holder at the African Institute for mathematical sciences in Cape Town, South Africa. Dr. Fantaye is a member of the Planck satellite consortium and has numerous scientific publications in cosmology and statistics. His current research interest is mainly focused in developing Machine Learning and other advanced statistical techniques for Astronomy and African social data analysis.