Keith Bechtol is an associate professor in the Department of Physics. He is an observational cosmologist who uses the universe as a laboratory to study the fundamental nature of matter, energy, space and time. Professor Bechtol made significant contributions to studies of the high-energy gamma-ray and neutrino emission of galaxies throughout cosmic time, led the discovery of several of the most dark matter dominated galaxies known, and assembled a catalog of more than 500 million galaxies to advance our understanding of dark energy. He has a leadership role in commissioning the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is expected to catalog more stars, galaxies, supernovae and solar system objects during its first year of operation than all previous astronomical telescopes combined.
A word from Dean Eric M. Wilcots:
Professor Bechtol has co-led the discovery of more than 20 Milky Way satellite galaxies, providing crucial evidence for the bottom-up hierarchical structure formation at the smallest scales. This body of work plays a major role in experimentally testing one of the most important predictions of cold/warm dark matter models.