Speaker: Ana Mourão (Departamento de Física e CENTRA - Centro de Astrofísica e Gravitação,  Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa).

Abstract: The determination of the cosmological parameters using observations of supernovae is affected by systematic errors. I will talk about the importance of the recent work by our team to the measurement of the polarization of the light from supernova galaxies to unveil the properties of the dust affecting the observations. Our results are based on data obtained with the FORS2, an optical instrument at the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Short bio: Ana Mourão is a researcher at CENTRA - Center for Astrophysics and Gravitation, and Associate Professor at the Department of Physics, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa. She works in the field of observational cosmology with supernovae.  Namely, she is particularly interested in the study of systematic errors that affect the determination of cosmological parameters using supernovae observations. She has participated  in several international collaborations like the SNLS - SuperNova Legacy Survey. More recently she has been participating in pioneering works to use integral field spectroscopy and polarimetry of supernova host galaxies to achieve a better understanding of supernova properties.