Astrophysics Seminars

Mar
17
2016

Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Warm Circumstellar Debris Disks: Diagnosing the Unseen Perturber
Erika Nesvold
11:00am|Bloomberg Hall, Astrophysics Library

Observations of circumstellar debris disks have revealed that a subset of this population harbor a warm dust component. This dust is short-lived, requiring continual replenishment, and indicating that the disk must be excited by an unseen perturber...

Mar
03
2016

Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Fire and Ice: The role of energetic processes in the cold chemistry of protoplanetary disks
Ilse Cleeves
11:00am|Bloomberg Hall, Astrophysics Library

Planets form from the coldest and densest parts of circumstellar disks around young stars. During this phase, the active nature of the star subjects the disk to relatively high fluxes of UV and X-ray photons and energetic particles. Simultaneously...

Feb
18
2016

Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar - TITLE ADDED

Stellar Dynamics around a Massive Black Hole
11:00am|Bloomberg Hall, Astrophysics Library

Galactic nuclei and the Massive black holes (MBHs) in their centers are rich environments, where the complex stellar dynamics plays an important role in many physical phenomena. We show that the standard description of the two-body relaxation...

Feb
04
2016

Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Observational Tests of SN Ia Explosion Models in a Paradigm Shift
11:00am|Bloomberg Hall, Astrophysics Library

The field of type Ia supernova (SN Ia) explosion physics is in a crisis. Decades of theoretical researches fail to demonstrate that successful explosions can be convincingly achieved from the popular single degenerate and double degenerate merger...

Jan
14
2016

Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Sweating the Small Stuff: Simulating dwarf galaxies, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, and their own tiny satellites
Coral Wheeler
11:00am|Bloomberg Hall, Astrophysics Library

If LCDM is correct, then all dark matter halos hosting galaxies, from those hosting dwarfs to those hosting giant clusters, are filled with abundant substructure down to very low mass scales ( 10^9 Msun). Specifically, even the dark matter halos of...