Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

Planetesimals are the building blocks of planets. They can be traced by the dust they produce in collisions or sublimation that forms a debris disk. In the solar system, such a dust disk is produced by the asteroids, comets and Kuiper Belt objects...

We know that most stars, if not all, were once surrounded by protoplanetary disks. How these young disks evolve into planetary systems is a fundamental question in astronomy. Observations of T Tauri stars (TTS) may provide insights into this...

The NASA Kepler Mission has demonstrated that planets with radii larger than Earth yet smaller than Neptune are common around Sun-like stars. Although Kepler has determined the physical sizes of hundreds of such planets, we know virtually nothing...

Hydrogen recombination at redshifts z ~ 1100 - 1500 leads to the rapid decrease of the optical depth of the Universe due to Thomson scattering. As a result CMB photons previously strongly coupled with baryonic matter become free and able to reach...

Galaxies mark the nexus between the "micro" scales of individual stars and black holes, and the "macro" scales of the "cosmic web", the large scale structure in which galaxies are embedded. Modeling the physics of galaxy formation is therefore one...

Intrinsic alignments of galaxy shapes with cosmological large-scale structure include a great deal of information about galaxy formation and evolution in a cosmological context, while also serving as a contaminant to weak gravitational lensing...

Note: Video recording will be available at https://www.ias.edu/video/sns.

The physical mechanism behind the acceleration of the universe remains one of the great mysteries of modern cosmology. Given the proliferation of dark energy models on the market, an obvious question is: How can we rule out whole classes of dark...

Infrared observations from Spitzer Space Telescope and Herschel Space Observatory are used to study the interstellar dust in M31. A physical dust model is used to map the dust surface density, dust/gas ratio, starlight heating intensity, and the...