OCR Text |
Show 159 THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH research posters on the hill 2012 PARTICLE DYNAMICS IN THE GALAXY'S GRAVITATIONAL POTENTIAL Benjamin Czaja (Benjamin Bromley) Department of Physics and Astronomy University of Utah The purpose of this project is to study the effects that our Galaxy's gravitational potential has on photons from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The CMB is a bath of photons that are relics of the Universe at early times following the big bang. Photons in the bath propagate freely in space, but can be deflected from their original paths by the gravitational potential of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. To study this deflection of light I numerically simulated the path of light rays as they travel through a three-component model of the Galaxy, with a disk, a central bulge and an extended halo. Specifically, I traced light rays, deflected by the Galaxy's gravity according to General Relativity, as they travel from an observer located at a position near the Sun. The results show that the amount of deflection increases as the light rays travel closer to the center of the galaxy; having a maximum deflection angle of 0.812037 arcseconds when traveling through a region 161.99 arcminutes away from galactic center. The significance of this work is the prediction of a potentially measurable distortion in the CMB by the Galaxy. In principle we may use these distortions to map out the gravitational potential of the Galaxy. |