Astrophysics

The Bahcall Lunch follow the astrophysics colloquium lecture. Registration is required by noon the previous Thursday so a meal can be provided.

Why haven't we found any planetary systems that look like ours? We are now in the fourth decade of detecting planets around other stars, with more than 6000 planets in 4500 systems. Detections via transit have found plenty of small planets, packed...

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a new NSF/DOE-funded facility on Cerro Pachón, Chile. It houses the 8.4m Simonyi Survey Telescope and the 3.2 Gigapixel LSSTCam camera. The Observatory achieved first light in 2025. Over a ten-year period (projected...

Abstract: We will present a commutation vector field approach for the solutions to the massless Vlasov equation on the exterior of a Schwarzschild spacetime, together with extensions to subextremal Kerr black holes. The approach satisfies two...

Binary stars in the central parsecs of galaxies are involved in the production of several modern astronomical phenomena, including hypervelocity stars, repeating partial tidal disruption events, and dust-enshrouded objects around Sgr A*. I present...