Astrophysics

Since bottoming out in 1999, the number of physics bachelor’s degrees awarded annually has increased dramatically for all reported racial and ethnic groups except African Americans. Moreover, physics and astronomy lag nearly every other field of...

Uncovering the physics of galaxy evolution has been a longstanding problem for astronomers. Physical galaxy properties like the star formation rate, stellar mass, and metallicity can tell us not only how these properties change over generations of...

It was suggested over thirty years ago that microscopic black holes can exponentially enhance the decay rate of a metastable false vacuum. The interest in this phenomenon has revived recently due to its possible phenomenological relevance for the...

The origin of multiple stellar populations (MPs) in globular clusters (GCs) is one of the most puzzling issues of stellar astrophysics. Several attempts to understand their formation have been done both from observational and theoretical studies...

What happens to planets when their stars begin to die? For many of the planets we’ve discovered outside our Solar System, the answer is a trip into the fiery depths of their host star, particularly when that star becomes a red giant. What happens...

In this talk, I'll discuss our recent work on the Terrestrial Reconnection Experiment (TREX) where magnetic reconnection is explored with asymmetric inflow conditions and in a configuration where the absolute rate of reconnection is set by an...

Abstract: Supermassive black holes create powerful jets of radiation and plasma particles that move close to the speed of light. The answers to the questions “how exactly are jets powered by energy extraction from a black hole” and “what are the...