Astrophysics Seminars

Black holes are never isolated in realistic astrophysical environments; instead, they are often perturbed by complicated external tidal fields. How does a black hole respond to these tidal perturbations? In this talk, I will discuss both the...

Since the first detection of a gravitational wave event of the merger of two neutron stars in 2017, two more detections in the neutron star mass range have been announced.  The first one, GW190425, involved an unusually massive neutron star, the...

Many space and astrophysical plasmas, such as the solar wind, radiatively inefficient accretion flows onto black holes, and the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters (ICM), are hot and dilute, which makes them weakly collisional or even...

The clustered nature of star formation leaves a long-term imprint on galaxies, stars, and planets. At young ages, stellar clustering subdivides galaxies into individual building blocks undergoing vigorous, feedback-driven life cycles that vary with...

I will talk about our latest data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, a project measuring millimeter emission over half the sky. I will give a flavor of the cosmology we are interested in testing via a new view of the Cosmic Microwave Background...

Star formation takes place in the densest and coldest parts of the interstellar medium (ISM), in dark molecular clouds. These are swept up by multiple supernova explosions on scales of several hundred parsec. While condensing out of the warm ISM...

I discuss graviton non-Gaussianities in models of inflation where de Sitter isometries are spontaneously broken. First, I review the different symmetry breaking patterns following Nicolis, Penco, Piazza, Rattazzi (2015), and discuss which of them...

The Milky Way is a unique testbed for theories of galaxy formation and evolution. Especially the stellar halo is amenable to studies into our galaxy’s past both because it contains some of the oldest stars and because the dynamical timescales are...

Binary neutron star mergers provide a unique probe of the neutron star equation of state (EOS) across a wide range of parameter space, from the zero-temperature EOS during the inspiral to the finite-temperature EOS following the merger. In this talk...

NASA's Kepler mission conducted a large survey of planetary systems.  Recently, we have advanced from measuring occurrence rates as a function of planet size and period to characterizing the intrinsic distribution of planetary system architectures. ...