Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

Supermassive black hole mergers are extraordinary cosmic phenomena characterized by their immense energy release, producing gravitational waves that can rival the total light output of all stars in the universe within a short time frame. These...

How and where do black hole mergers form in our Universe? After 10 years of GW science with LIGO/Virgo/Kagra, there still seems to be no direct indication of what the underlying astrophysical formation channels are. I will present ideas and ongoing...

The interstellar medium (ISM) is a turbulent, multi-phase, magnetic environment. It is home to vastly different gas phases, from cold, dense clouds to hot, tenuous plasma. Magnetic fields thread this interstellar environment, helping to sculpt...

At the center of nearly every galaxy in the Universe resides a supermassive black hole. When galaxies collide, their supermassive black holes sink to the center of the newly forming galaxy. There in this nascent galactic nucleus a supermassive black...

Over the last decade, large optical time-domain surveys have systematized the discovery of transient flares of emission associated with the tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes. These tidal disruption events (TDEs) are rare events...

Cosmological data has opened up new vistas on fundamental physics yet it is limited in its scope. While it has given us tantalizing hints at how the Universe might be expanding, it is unclear whether it can ever be used to find the microphysical...

Surveys of the mm-wave sky are great resources for astrophysics and cosmology. Sources that have been studied include solar system objects, flaring stars, accreting black holes, dusty star forming galaxies, and galaxy clusters, while cosmological...

I will present a program of extracting cosmological information by combining effective field theory (EFT) techniques with data from spectroscopic galaxy surveys. I will highlight previous successes of this program and share recent results, including...

Recent breakthroughs in gravitational wave and electromagnetic observations have given better and better insights into black holes and extreme gravity. While one usually thinks of black holes as the unyielding final state of gravitational collapse...

LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA have recently announced the discovery of over 200 new compact binary mergers in low latency during their fourth observing run (O4), a majority of which are stellar-mass binary black hole mergers. The first segment of this run...