Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity Commons^™

Information Entropic Content Of Astrophysical Spectra: Applications To Cosmology And Astrobiology, Sara Vannah

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Astrophysics faces two critical challenges: the difficulty of observing very distant targets and the difficulty of interpreting science in diverse and often extreme environments that have not been replicated on Earth. In this thesis, we discuss two types of spectra — one from early universe cosmology and one from astrobiology — where improvements in telescope technology are just ushering in a wave of precise observations, addressing the first challenge. This accelerates the need for a solution to the second challenge. Traditional methods for analyzing these two spectra rely heavily on unsettled science, biasing results to match the input assumptions. In …