Masao Sako, Ph.D.

My research focuses on observational cosmology with supernovae (SNe). Measurements of luminosity distances to Type Ia SNe have shown that our Universe is dominated by an unknown component called "dark energy", which is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. My group is involved in current (SDSS-II) and future (DES, SNAP, LSST) large-scale optical surveys that will discover many thousands of SNe that will be used to map out the detailed expansion history of our Universe. I am also interested in several aspects of high energy astrophysics including X-ray spectroscopy and observations of gamma-ray bursts, X-ray binaries, supermassive black holes, and clusters of galaxies.