Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

We currently know of more than 10,000 planets and planet candidates orbiting nearby stars.  This population is dominated by planets with masses between 1-10 times that of the Earth, which can be divided into two broad classes (‘sub-Neptunes’ and...

I will discuss recent and ongoing work focused on attempts to restore concordance amongst cosmological data sets, motivated by discrepancies amongst some inferences of the cosmic expansion rate (H_0) and the matter clustering amplitude (S_8).  I...

The exchange of baryons between galaxies and their surrounding intergalactic medium (IGM) is a crucial but poorly constrained aspect of galaxy formation and evolution. I will present results from the Keck Baryonic Structure Survey (KBSS) and the...

For more than a decade, enigmatic extragalactic flashes called fast radio bursts (FRBs) have defied a definitive explanation for their origin. In addition, the unique properties of FRBs make them promising probes of both cosmology and the...

Understanding the physics of galaxy formation is an outstanding problem in modern astrophysics. Recent cosmological simulations have demonstrated that feedback by star formation, supernovae and active galactic nuclei appears to be critical in...

Turbulence is a near ubiquitous feature of fluids and plasmas in geospace, the heliosphere and in astrophysics and well as in laboratory plasma and in the terrestrial environment. Turbulence links large scale energy reservoirs with small scale...

How magnetized turbulent plasmas can accelerate charged particles to high energies represents a long-standing question with far-reaching implications for high-energy and multi-messenger astrophysics. It indeed goes back to the seminal works of...

Planets are not layered in general. The strong evidence of layering on Earth arises because the main components (mantle and core) are immiscible. This is a thermodynamic property and nothing to do with gravity. However, immiscible phases can...

AGN feedback is now widely considered to be one of the main drivers in regulating the growth of massive galaxies. In my talk I will describe several efforts in our group to understand the power, reach and impact of AGN feedback processes. We find...