Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

Equilibrium phase-space models have enabled much of what we know about the structure of the Milky Way, including global or bulk properties of Galactic dark matter. Kinematic data from the recent second data release from the Gaia mission has shown...

For 13 years, the rich suite of scientific investigations onboard the Cassini spacecraft was brought to bear on everything in the Saturn system -- its atmosphere, magnetosphere, enormous rings, and retinue of moons. This presentation will highlight...

The cosmic microwave background contains a wealth of information about cosmology as well as high energy physics. It tells us about the composition and geometry of the universe, the properties of neutrinos, dark matter, and even the conditions in our...

Rapid accretion of matter into either stellar mass or supermassive black holes produces some the most luminous objects in the Universe, such as quasars, ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), and tidal disruption events. Understanding such flows is...

In the past couple of years the gravitational-wave detections enabled by the LIGO detectors have launched a new field in astrophysics allowing us to study compact object mergers involving pairs of black holes and neutron stars. I will discuss what...

The first billion years is a pivotal time for cosmic structure formation. The galaxies and black holes that form then shape and influence all future generations of stars and black holes. Understanding and detecting the the first galaxies and black...

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...