Astrophysics Seminars

The flow of disk material close to a planet, at separations of order r_H, the Hill radius, generates the largest transfer of angular momentum and mass between the planet and the circumstellar disk. For large, Jupiter-size planets, they typically...

B-type main-sequence (MS) stars (M = 3 - 16 Msun) with closely orbiting stellar companions can evolve to produce Type Ia supernovae, X-ray binaries, millisecond pulsars, gamma ray bursts, and sources of gravitational waves. However, the formation...

Understanding whether Helium can sediment to the core of galaxy clusters is important for a number of problems in cosmology and astrophysics. For example, our ignorance in the distribution of Helium leads to systematic uncertainties in estimating...

The expansion history of the Universe prior to Big Bang nucleosynthesis is unknown. This ignorance profoundly limits our understanding of dark matter: we cannot calculate its relic abundance without knowing when the Universe became radiation...

The new era of exoplanetary discovery has begun to allow a statistical understanding of planetary distributions to inform our knowledge of planet formation and migration. These data now allow us to start inferring the relative importance of various...