University of Pennsylvania Astrophysics Seminar

Wide-area cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys are designed for precision cosmology, but also provide unique opportunities for time domain astronomy at millimetre (mm) wavelengths. In this talk, Dr. Hincks will describe how he has used the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), and can soon use the Simons Observatory (SO), to search for transient phenomena like stellar flares, tidal disruption events (TDEs) and gamma ray bursts (GRBs), to study pulsars and magnetars, and to monitor the variable brightnesses of blazars. Dr. Hincks will also describe ACT's observations of two supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) candidates and explain how SO is poised to discover and characterize dozens of SMBHB systems by monitoring of blazar variability.