Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

Perhaps the most stunning surprise revealed by JWST yet is a class of compact, red, high-redshift sources (z~2-9) found in virtually every image the telescope takes. The sheer numbers of these ``Little Red Dots" demand that any satisfying theory of...

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a new NSF/DOE-funded facility on Cerro Pachón, Chile. It houses the 8.4m Simonyi Survey Telescope and the 3.2 Gigapixel LSSTCam camera. The Observatory achieved first light in 2025. Over a ten-year period (projected...

Numerical simulations of cosmic structure formation have become a powerful tool in astrophysics. Starting right after the Big Bang, they predict the dark matter backbone of the cosmic web far into the non-linear regime and follow complex galaxy...

The search for life in the Universe is frustrated by a single known example, ourselves - a data point loaded with selection bias. In such a data starved regime, priors have an outsized role and it's tempting to throw our arms in the air in despair...

Supermassive black hole mergers are extraordinary cosmic phenomena characterized by their immense energy release, producing gravitational waves that can rival the total light output of all stars in the universe within a short time frame. These...

How and where do black hole mergers form in our Universe? After 10 years of GW science with LIGO/Virgo/Kagra, there still seems to be no direct indication of what the underlying astrophysical formation channels are. I will present ideas and ongoing...

The interstellar medium (ISM) is a turbulent, multi-phase, magnetic environment. It is home to vastly different gas phases, from cold, dense clouds to hot, tenuous plasma. Magnetic fields thread this interstellar environment, helping to sculpt...

At the center of nearly every galaxy in the Universe resides a supermassive black hole. When galaxies collide, their supermassive black holes sink to the center of the newly forming galaxy. There in this nascent galactic nucleus a supermassive black...

Over the last decade, large optical time-domain surveys have systematized the discovery of transient flares of emission associated with the tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes. These tidal disruption events (TDEs) are rare events...

Cosmological data has opened up new vistas on fundamental physics yet it is limited in its scope. While it has given us tantalizing hints at how the Universe might be expanding, it is unclear whether it can ever be used to find the microphysical...