Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

In the inner Milky Way stars trek together in a bar-shaped, rotating overdensity: the central bar, which dominates the inner disc out half-way to the Sun. The rotation velocity/pattern speed of this bar has been intensely debated. The best insight...

The births and mergers of neutron stars and black holes, the most exotic objects in the universe, can launch the fastest cosmic jets (gamma-ray bursts; GRBs) and shake the very fabric of space-time with gravitational waves. GW170817, the merger of...

Millisecond pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars with phenomenal rotational stability. Pulsar timing arrays world-wide monitor over 100 of these cosmic clocks in order to search for perturbations due to gravitational waves at nanohertz...

The first three observing runs of the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA gravitational wave detectors produced a wealth of "firsts," including the first observation of multiple "ringdown" modes from a black hole---the remnant of the first-ever binary black hole...

We are entering an extremely data-rich era in the next decade, with full 6D+chemistry information on dozens of stellar streams, to shape our understanding on the chemo-dynamical evolution of the Milky Way, as well as the nature of the dark matter. In...

Astronomical transients are signposts of catastrophic events in space, including the most extreme stellar deaths, stellar tidal disruptions by supermassive black holes, and mergers of compact objects. Thanks to new and improved observational...

The birth of stars is one of the most complex problems challenging modern astrophysics. Understanding their origins is of fundamental importance to many areas of astronomy, from exoplanet studies to cosmology. While the study of the initial...

The study of the transient night sky offers an opportunity to tackle some long-standing open questions in astrophysics, such as: how and why do stars explode? when do such explosions leave behind neutrons stars or black holes? and what is the origin...

The Milky Way's satellite dwarf galaxies are powerful probes of many important astrophysical processes. Their kinematics provide insights into galactic dynamics and the nature of dark matter, while their chemical compositions preserve a history of...

The centers of massive galaxies are special in many ways, not least because apparently all of them host supermassive black holes. Since the discovery of a number of relations linking the mass of this central black hole to the large scale properties...