Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

The first light of a core-collapse supernova emerges the moment a shock front breaches the stellar photosphere — just after the star has been engulfed by its explosion, and just before it releases its fastest ejecta. Shock emergence is implicated in...

ABSTRACT: The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has recently discovered a diffuse flux of astrophysical neutrinos, neutrinos from beyond the solar system. But how does one collect neutrinos at the South Pole? Why study neutrinos for astronomy? In this...

Deviations from a uniformly expanding universe are of interest in modern cosmology, most particularly because the amplitude of such peculiar motions measures the strength of gravity on scales of roughly 10-100 Mpc. I will review various recent...

After 50 years of dreaming about it, space-based microlensing observations are now underway. A 2014 100-hr Spitzer Pilot Program generated "microlens parallaxes" for dozens of lenses, opening the prospect of measuring the Galactic distribution of...

A combination of sub-mm observations and numerical simulations have the potential to yield direct constraints on the environment of planet formation. After a review of recent observational surprises, I will discuss the implications of our first...

After a basic introduction on how asteroseismology works in practice, we illustrate its application to various kinds of stars of different mass and evolutionary stage. We show how detected oscillation modes allow us to understand details of the...

Recent Spitzer observations have revealed presence of near-IR excesses in spectra of more than thirty white dwarfs with atmospheres enriched in metals. These excesses are naturally interpreted as reprocessing of the stellar emission by compact...

The increasing role of general relativity in the dynamics of stellar systems with central massive black holes, in the generation of extreme mass-ratio inspirals, and in the evolution of hierarchical triple systems inspires a close examination of how...