Astrophysics Seminars

We have a good story, even with evidence, that all structure in the universe evolved from the diffusion of quantum-fluctuations that broke the adiabaticity of coarse-grained kinematic field trajectories during inflation. I will describe the use of...

Hydrogen and helium make up 98% of ordinary matter in the universe. These two lightest elements were created in the Big Bang. Stars fuse lighter elements into heavier ones, but this process cannot produce elements heavier than iron. A more exotic...

Black holes are responsible for a wide variety of astrophysical phenomena. They devour stars, eject relativistic jets, affect star formation and galaxy evolution, and enrich the Universe with heavy elements. I will discuss how global general...

Dark matter is necessary to explain an array of astrophysical and cosmological observations, from the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background to the dynamics of the smallest galaxies. In astrophysics, dark matter is often thought of as being...

Lyman-alpha Emitting galaxies or Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs), star-forming galaxies selected through their strong Lyman-alpha emission, are becoming an important probe of galaxy formation, cosmic reionization, and cosmology. I will present our...

The Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) was launched in June 2017 to the International Space Station (ISS) where it is studying the transient X-ray sky. NICER consists of a collection of X-ray concentrators, silicon drift detectors...

Understanding physical processes responsible for the formation and evolution of galaxies like the Milky Way is a fundamental problem. However, a key challenge is that the properties and orbits of the stars can only be observed at present: to...

The circumgalactic medium contains the fuel for future star formation and the record of past feedback, making it uniquely sensitive to the physics of baryonic flows---one of the principal missing ingredients in our understanding of galaxy evolution...

Besides discovering thousands of planetary systems orbiting other stars, one of the legacies of NASA's Kepler mission is the discovery of new planetary architectures. Systems of up to seven planets have been found with orbital periods near integer...

There is an enormous amount of information stored in the positions, velocities and chemistry of resolved stellar populations in the Milky Way. A comprehensive theory of galaxy formation can only be formed through the complementary information...