Astrophysics Seminars

Jan
15
2015

Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Disk-Planet Interaction: From 2D to 3D
11:00am|Bloomberg Hall, Astrophysics Library

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...

Jan
08
2015

Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Eclipsing Binaries
Maxwell Moe
11:00am|Bloomberg Hall, Astrophysics Library

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...

Dec
11
2014

Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

On the Dynamics of Helium in the Dilute Intracluster Medium
11:00am|Bloomberg Hall, Astrophysics Library

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...

Nov
20
2014

Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Using Microhalos to Probe the Origins of Dark Matter
Adrienne Erickcek
11:00am|Bloomberg Hall, Astrophysics Library

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...

Oct
30
2014

Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Shedding Light on Planet-Disk Interactions
Dave Tsang
11:00am|Bloomberg Hall, Astrophysics Library

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...