Astrophysics

The Bahcall Lunch follow the astrophysics colloquium lecture. Registration is required by 6pm the previous Thursday so a meal can be provided. Email Amanda at cenker@ias.edu with questions.

I will weave three separate threads. The first will be to describe recent and ongoing results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Survey. I will present the BAO results from the early DESI data, and some of the preparatory work for the Year 1 data. I...

The Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect—the Doppler boost of low-energy Cosmic Microwave Background photons scattering off free electrons—is an excellent probe of ionized gas residing in distant galaxies. Its two main constituents are the kinematic SZ effect...

Abstract: General relativistic ray tracing and radiative transfer (GRRT) are numerical techniques for simulating images of black holes.  They have played an instrumental role in both predicting and interpreting the horizon scale resolution images...

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...

Abstract: Over the last four decades, the axion has gone from being an elegant but undetectable dark matter candidate to becoming one of the primary targets of dedicated searches around the globe.  Many of these searches have been catalysts for the...

Protoplanetary disks are the birthplaces of planets. Over the past decade, there have been significant advancements in disk observations thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and extreme adaptive optics (ExAOs). Hundreds of disks have...

Galactic microlensing is the only known method to discover dark objects ranging from isolated stellar-mass black holes (BHs) down to Earth-mass free-floating planets (FFPs). The recent success of interferometric resolution of microlensed images with...

Time-domain astrophysics is entering a golden age with discovery rates increasing exponentially thanks to combining public and private surveys such as the Young Supernova Experiment and the Zwicky Transient Facility. However, the number of events...