Astrophysics

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...

Abstract: As the search space for light dark matter (DM) has shifted to sub-GeV DM candidate partcles, increasing attention has turned to solid state detectors built from “quantum materials”. While traditonal solid state detector targets (e.g. Si or...

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.

The iconic spiral arms that decorate the disks of massive galaxies (like our own Milky Way) have been studied observationally and theoretically since they were first recorded 180 years ago, nevertheless the exact details of their nature remains...

Studies of cosmology, galaxy evolution, and astronomical transients with the next generation of imaging surveys (like LSST, Euclid, and Roman Observatories) are all critically dependent on estimates of galaxy redshifts from imaging data alone; the...

I will discuss the challenges and prospects of Gravitational-wave Paleontology:  studying massive (binary) stars from their “remnants” as compact object mergers, with the goal to answer key open questions in gravitational-wave astronomy today: What...