Astrophysics Seminars

Despite the apparent complexity of galaxies, some of their most basic properties (mass M, binding energy E, angular momentum J, etc) obey simple power-law scaling relations. Such relations provide some of the clearest insights into galaxy formation...

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detector network has observed over 70 gravitational-wave sources to date, including mergers between black holes, neutron stars, and mixed neutron star-black holes. Focusing on the black hole mergers, I will describe some recent...

The Milky Way contains of order 10^8 stellar-mass black holes (BHs). Yet, fewer than 100 BH candidates are known, and only about 20 are dynamically confirmed. Our view of the BH population has been shaped almost entirely by observations of X-ray...

In 1970, Allan Sandage famously described Cosmology as "A search for two numbers". In the half-century since that description of the field was penned, as Stage III cosmic surveys come to an end and Stage-IV surveys begin taking data, the field finds...

Star-shredding supermassive black holes (Tidal Disruption Events, TDEs) are potential emitters of high energy hadrons and neutrinos. Several TDEs have been observed as coincident with neutrino events detected at the IceCube neutrino observatory. I...

Recent horizon-scale images of Messier 87* and Sagittarius A* have been used to demonstrate that their spacetimes are well-described by the Kerr metric. The latter is a solution to the vacuum Einstein equations of general relativity, and is used to...

In this talk, I will review recent progress in understanding the complex multi-scale plasma physics of neutron star magnetospheres through the lens of first-principles particle-in-cell simulations. I will highlight pair production discharges near...

Many modern techniques to analyze global planetary signals, from satellite gravity and the geoid, to magnetic fields, to the making of seismological models, heavily rely on a global function basis - the spherical harmonics. When the available data...

Redshifted 21cm emission from neutral hydrogen is rapidly becoming one of our most powerful observables in cosmology. With it, we can study the evolution of dark energy at low/intermediate redshifts, the epoch of reionization, the first stars in the...

Circumbinary discs around young stars have been observed to be misaligned to the binary orbital plane. A misaligned circumbinary gas disc evolves towards one of two states: alignment with the binary orbital plane or polar alignment where the disc is...