Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

The commonly observed Type Ia supernovae likely occur when one star in a binary undergoes a sudden detonation triggered by the transfer of mass from a closely orbiting companion. Due to the short orbital period of 5-10 minutes of many explosion...

I will present a combination of three observational techniques—astrometry, radial velocity, and direct imaging—to discover, weigh, and characterize massive exoplanets and brown dwarfs.  Only a few exoplanets have both measured masses (from radial...

The Dragonfly project is developing a new class of telescopes optimized for low surface brightness astronomy. Originally designed to test the ΛCDM prediction that galaxies are embedded in extended tidal debris fields, Dragonfly combines the light...

The recent launch of the XRISM observatory has opened a new era in high-energy astrophysics, providing high-resolution X-ray spectra of various X-ray sources, including the long-awaited spectra of extended X-ray sources like clusters of galaxies...

Cosmology is undergoing a data revolution. Surveys such as the imminent Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to be conducted by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will deliver huge galaxy catalogues that provide critical tools for understanding the...

The detection of GW170817 enabled us to track down and watch the cataclysm event in multiple wavelengths of light, allowing us to scrutinize the source of these cosmic ripples for the first time. This discovery provided the first solid evidence that...

The high and dry desert of the Chilean Andes is a magnificent site from which to observe the universe.  The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) made measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from there for fifteen years, with a series of...

The origins of the millisecond-duration, energetic (>10^39 erg) fast radio bursts (FRBs) at extragalactic distances remain shrouded in mystery. Although FRBs are likely associated with neutron stars, they appear to occur in a remarkable diversity of...

By precisely measuring the motions stars on the sky over time, the Gaia mission is conducting a comprehensive census of the Milky Way's binary stars. These data are transformative both for population modeling and for discovery of rare objects. I...

Machine learning methods are having a huge impact in astrophysics. However, ML has a strong ontology — in which only the data exist — and a strong epistemology — in which a model is considered good if and only if it performs well on held-out...