Astrophysics Seminars

Superradiant instabilities may create clouds of ultralight bosons around rotating black holes, forming so-called "gravitational atoms". In this talk, I will review a series of papers that study the effects of a binary companion’s presence. The...

I’ll discuss an old technique called intensity interferometry, pioneered by Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) that allows us to achieve sub-microarcsecond angular resolution using ordinary ground-based optical telescopes observing visible light.  This...

The following statements are often made about high-redshift Lyman Alpha Emitting (LAE) galaxies:  

1.  They are young, low-dust galaxies undergoing initial bursts of star formation.  

2.  Due to resonant scattering, Lyman alpha photons experience much...

In this talk I will review the current state of and future prospects for exoplanet demographics. I will walk through the latest understanding of the frequency of Earth-like planets from Kepler, and their implications for NASA’s next flagship mission...

Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies present unsolved theoretical challenges for our understanding of high-energy astrophysics, gravity and gravitational waves, star and galaxy formation, and space plasma physics. For decades, our...

More than a century ago, Albert Einstein presented his general theory of gravitation. One of the predictions of this theory is that not only particles and objects with mass, but also the quanta of light, photons, are tied to the curvature of space...

While the vast majority of the light from our galaxy comes from the Galactic disk, the vast majority of the mass of the Milky Way (MW) is in its dark matter halo. Because we cannot directly observe the MW's dark matter halo, we must use luminous...

Recent observations reveal that cosmic rays (CRs) are more tightly confined in various astrophysical systems (e.g. radio bubbles) than current theories predict. I show that microscale magnetic fluctuations, particularly from the mirror instability...

I will discuss a new method for analyzing the morphology of supernova remnants (SNRs) by using power specula analysis to diagnose the drivers responsible for structure at different angular scales. Using a suite of hydrodynamic models of the Rayleigh...

The cosmic history of galaxy formation is the history of star formation writ large.  Some of the most important processes affecting galaxy evolution involve coupling between stellar and gaseous components, since massive stars are the primary energy...