Astrophysics Seminars

May
19
2022

Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Stellar Basins
Ken Van Tilburg
11:00am|Bloomberg Lecture Hall and Zoom

I will describe the phenomenology of stellar basins: volumetric stellar emission into gravitationally bound orbits of weakly coupled particles such as axions, moduli, hidden photons, and fermions. While only a tiny fraction of the instantaneous...

May
17
2022

Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Lessons from Astrophysical Models of Sgr A* and the Event Horizon Telescope
11:00am|Bloomberg Lecture Hall and Zoom

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has recently published the first image of the near-horizon region around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Sgr A*. In addition to providing new constraints on general...

May
12
2022

Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Neutrino Quantum Kinetics in Neutron Star Mergers
Sherwood Richers III
11:00am|Bloomberg Lecture Hall and Zoom

Following the collision of two compact objects, an accretion disk forms and from it matter is ejected that sources the universe's heavy elements and that is observable as a kilonova. The amount of ejecta, the types of elements that form, and the...

Apr
28
2022

Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Not your grandparents' binary stars
11:00am|Bloomberg Lecture Hall and Zoom

Close binaries are the origin of many extraordinary events in the Universe, including type Ia supernovae and gravitational wave events. On the other extreme, wide binaries are easily disrupted by gravitational perturbations, making them a unique...

Apr
21
2022

Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Ultralight Dark Matter and Cosmological Condensed Matter Physics
Evan McDonough
11:00am|Bloomberg Lecture Hall and Zoom

The identity of dark matter remains a mystery, despite decades of theorizing and detection efforts. This includes the mechanism for its primordial production, its interactions with itself or with visible matter, and the very nature of dark matter...

Apr
14
2022

Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Black hole searches for ultralight bosons.
Masha Baryakhtar
11:00am|Bloomberg Lecture Hall and Zoom

I will discuss how black holes can become nature's laboratories for ultralight axions. When a boson's Compton wavelength is comparable to the horizon size of a black hole, energy and angular momentum from the black hole are converted into...

Apr
07
2022

Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space
Kevin Hand
11:00am|Bloomberg Lecture Hall and Zoom

A key discovery from the past six decades of solar system exploration is that liquid water oceans may be a common planetary phenomenon. At least six ice-covered moons of the outer solar system present compelling evidence for subsurface oceans, and...

Mar
31
2022

Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Galaxies Far, Far Away: Modeling challenges for precision weak lensing and combined-probe cosmology
Jonathan Blazek
11:00am|Bloomberg Lecture Hall and Zoom

Galaxy surveys, which observe the positions and shapes of galaxies across large areas of the sky, can map a significant fraction of our cosmic volume. With the recent or imminent start of several next-generation projects — including LSST, Euclid...

Mar
24
2022

Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Collider tools for classical gravity
Julio Parra-Martinez
11:00am|Bloomberg Lecture Hall and Zoom

In this talk I will describe recent progress in applying tools from collider physics to problems in classical general relativity. This program has produced state-of-the-art calculations of the conservative two-body Hamiltonian at the fourth order in...

Mar
17
2022

Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

Core-collapse Supernovae as a Probe of New Physics
Andrea Caputo
11:00am|Bloomberg Lecture Hall and Zoom

Core-collapse supernovae (CCSN) are efficient laboratories to explore physics beyond the standard model (SM). In particular, they have been used to put strong constraints on axion and axion like particles, and on many other motivated extensions of...