Astrophysics

One of the strongest predictions of the standard cold dark matter paradigm is the hierarchy of structure down to Earth-mass scales. However, individual self-bound clumps of dark matter--"halos"--are difficult to detect directly. Instead, we use...

Quantum fluctuations in inflation provide the seeds for the large scale distribution of matter today. According to the standard paradigm, these fluctuations induce density perturbations that are adiabatic and Gaussian distributed. In this limit, all...

We have performed three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations and semi-analytical calculations, in order to address the injection, survival and growth of dust grains within starburst-driven superbubbles in the local and high-redshift Universe. Upon...

Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) have been implicated as a large reservoir of reactive carbon in the interstellar medium since the 1980s. PAHs have been widely attributed as the carriers of the unidentified infrared bands where their...

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...