Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

Feedback from a central supermassive black hole is an essential component of galaxy evolution models. Without it, those models cannot produce realistic massive galaxies and galaxy clusters. However, the black-hole feedback mechanism remains...

The discovery of gravitational waves by advanced LIGO has sparked a worldwide effort to detect associated electromagnetic emission, which would localize the sources and illuminate the physics of compact object mergers. A merger involving two neutron...

In the past 5 years, new observational facilities have provided remarkable data sets against which we can evaluate theories of star formation and planet formation. I will describe three different theoretical investigations motivated or corroborated...

I will present an overview of efforts across the electromagnetic spectrum to identify and study tidal disruption flares (TDFs), when a star wanders too close to a super-massive black hole and is torn apart by tidal forces. In particular I will focus...

Dark matter constitutes more than 5/6 of the matter in the universe, but its nature and interactions remain one of the great puzzles of fundamental physics. Dark matter collisions or decays, occurring throughout the universe's past, have the...

The Cassini mission to Saturn continues to transform our understanding of this beautiful ringed planet and its entourage of moons. I'll provide an insider's view of the Cassini mission as the team leader of the Radio Science Team, and highlight some...

Black holes come in at least two varieties. Supermassive black holes lay at the centers of galaxies and, while not theoretically predicted, have been definitively proven to exist using observations of stars' orbits at the heart of the Milky Way...

Tracing matter and chemical elements in the Universe is critical for understanding the formation of the first galaxies, the formation and growth of supermassive black holes, and ultimately the evolution of galaxies like our Milky Way. Throughout the...

DATE & TIME CHANGED! The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) was the first mission to explore the global heliosphere and in concert with Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 is discovering a fundamentally new and uncharted physical domain of the outer...

In recent years, the number of known galaxy clusters has grown dramatically, thanks in large part to the success of surveys utilizing the Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect. In particular, surveys like the South Pole Telescope 2500 deg^2 survey have...