Astrophysics Seminars

NASA's Kepler mission conducted a large survey of planetary systems.  Recently, we have advanced from measuring occurrence rates as a function of planet size and period to characterizing the intrinsic distribution of planetary system architectures. ...

Earth-based radar observations in 2006–2019 enable the first measurement of the spin precession rate and moment of inertia of Venus. The observations also show that the spin period of the solid planet changes by tens of minutes. The length-of-day...

I will present the first results of the survey of all white dwarfs (WD) that were observed in the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) using the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS). The final outcome will be...

A dark matter candidate lighter than about 30 eV exhibits wave behavior in a typical galactic environment. Examples include the QCD axion as well as other axion-like-particles. We review the particle physics motivations, and discuss experimental and...

High-precision astrometric data from space observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Gaia, are revolutionizing our ability to study the Local Group. 6D phase space measurements (3-dimensional position and velocity) now make it...

Over the next decade, large galaxy surveys will map billions of galaxies and probe cosmic structure formation with high statistical precision. This talk will focus on the opportunities and challenges of cosmological analyses in the presence of...

Recent observations of binary black hole and binary neutron star mergers have ignited interest in the formation and evolution of compact-object binary systems. However, by the time a compact-object binary merges and produces gravitational-wave...

Neutron star merger GW 170817 was accompanied by a gamma-ray burst with luminosity $L\sim 10^{47}$ erg/s, coming with a ~2 s delay after the gravitational waves. Observations also indicate the presence of a dark, ultra-relativistic envelope ejected...

We have undertaken a novel census of red sources identified by their rest-frame far infrared colors using Planck and Herschel telescopes, and not by the Sunyaev-Z'eldovich effect (SZE). The vast majority of sources are high-redshift galaxy...

I will discuss recent work that lays out two methods to obtain direct measurements of the Galactic acceleration. First, I will review our recent work in using high precision spectrographs to measure the Galactic acceleration. These measurements can...