Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

Dust is ubiquitous and inescapable in astrophysics, yet its dynamics remain poorly understood. I’ll describe the properties of a newly-discovered class of instabilities which exist in any coupled dust-gas system. Dust grains streaming through gas...

To include the full non-Gaussian information about cosmology and the large-scale structure from measurements of weak gravitational lensing, one needs to go beyond second-order correlations. In my talk I first show results from the aperture-mass...

Current cosmological measurements have left us with deep questions about our Universe: What caused the expansion of the Universe at the earliest times? How did structure form? What is Dark Energy and does it evolve with time? New experiments like...

Our understanding of the dynamics of our Local Group of galaxies has changed dramatically over the past few years owing to significant advancements in astrometry and our theoretical understanding of galaxy structure. I will provide an overview of...

Cosmological simulations of galaxy formation have evolved significantly over the last years. In my talk I will describe recent efforts to model the large-scale distribution of galaxies with cosmological hydrodynamics simulations. I will focus on the...

Since Parker's 1958 paper predicting a supersonic outflow from the Sun, spacecraft measurements and theoretical investigations have led to considerable progress in our understanding of the solar wind. In this talk, I will review one of the leading...

The NASA New Horizons spacecraft provided the first close look at Pluto, its moons, and environment during its close flyby in 2015. Pluto was shown to be a complex active planet with a variegated surface exhibiting heterogeneous geological processes...

In the course of structure formation, only a small fraction of the baryons turned into stars - most remain in a diffuse hot intergalactic medium. The growth and evolution of galaxies is controlled by feedback processes, such as energy and metal...

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are a newly discovered astrophysical phenomenon consisting of short (few ms) bursts of radio waves. FRBs occur roughly 1000 times per sky per day. From their dispersion measures, these events are clearly extragalactic and...