Astrophysics

The jet in M87 is likely powered by the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy via the Blandford–Znajek (BZ) mechanism, through which energy can be siphoned away from a spinning black hole and converted into a Poynting flux jet. The...

Upcoming Large-Scale Structure surveys will likely become the next leading sources of cosmological information, making it crucial to have a precise understanding of the influence of baryons on cosmological observables. The Effective Field Theory of...

The discovery of thousands of new planetary candidates over the last decade has revolutionized the field of planet formation. One of Kepler's key findings is that the most abundant planets in our galaxy, observed to date, are larger than Earth but...

Each week, we hold a relatively informal seminar/discussion series with an emphasis on extra-galactic and large-scale structure astrophysics.

During Galread a leader/visitor presents a recent paper to the discussion group. The PDF of the paper is...

Magnetic reconnection can power bright and rapid flares originating from the inner magnetosphere of accreting black holes. We conduct extremely high resolution general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics simulations, capturing plasmoid-mediated...

As the closest galactic nucleus, Milky Way's Nuclear Star Cluster (NSC) provides a unique opportunity to resolve the stellar population and to study its composition and star formation in this extreme environment. The limitation in our current...

One of the best laboratories to study strong-field gravity is the inner 100s of kilometers around black holes and neutron stars in binary systems with low-mass stars like our Sun. The X-ray light curves of these systems show variability on...

I will introduce the Gaia mission and briefly summarize the latest datarelease, Gaia EDR3, including some guidance on the use of the data. Thisis complemented by highlights of the science results from Gaia DR2 and Gaia EDR3.

Observations of type Ia supernovae (SN Ia), a class of exploding stars, ushered in a cosmological revolution: the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, driven by dark energy. I will describe current cosmological applications of SN Ia to measure...