Astrophysics Seminars

The clustered nature of star formation leaves a long-term imprint on galaxies, stars, and planets. At young ages, stellar clustering subdivides galaxies into individual building blocks undergoing vigorous, feedback-driven life cycles that vary with...

I will talk about our latest data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, a project measuring millimeter emission over half the sky. I will give a flavor of the cosmology we are interested in testing via a new view of the Cosmic Microwave Background...

Star formation takes place in the densest and coldest parts of the interstellar medium (ISM), in dark molecular clouds. These are swept up by multiple supernova explosions on scales of several hundred parsec. While condensing out of the warm ISM...

I discuss graviton non-Gaussianities in models of inflation where de Sitter isometries are spontaneously broken. First, I review the different symmetry breaking patterns following Nicolis, Penco, Piazza, Rattazzi (2015), and discuss which of them...

The Milky Way is a unique testbed for theories of galaxy formation and evolution. Especially the stellar halo is amenable to studies into our galaxy’s past both because it contains some of the oldest stars and because the dynamical timescales are...

Binary neutron star mergers provide a unique probe of the neutron star equation of state (EOS) across a wide range of parameter space, from the zero-temperature EOS during the inspiral to the finite-temperature EOS following the merger. In this talk...

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...