Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are a big puzzle in astrophysics. Observational evidence and theoretical arguments connect FRBs to magnetars, yet their emission mechanism is not established. One popular picture resembles pulsars on steroids, with radio...

Black holes are detected through a variety of methods, each revealing a different part of their nature. These include gravitational-wave emissions that detect compact-object binary mergers, X-ray radiation that captures dramatic accretion episodes...

Time-domain surveys are finding tens of thousands (and soon millions) of transient events.  But how do we make new discoveries of rare and exotic events? And how do we figure out what causes and powers them? I will discuss several approaches that...

Abstract: Current pulsar timing array (PTA) projects are galactic-scale gravitational-wave (GW) detectors whose sensitivity is approaching the point at which a signal should become clearly detectable. Despite the strong evidence reported in the...

Abstract: Black hole mergers carry information about some of the least understood stages of stellar evolution, the dynamics of dense stellar systems, and the growth of compact objects through accretion. Gravitational-wave observations offer a way to...

Transient surveys and follow up efforts are providing a wealth of new data on the variety of ways in which tidal disruption events manifest across the electromagnetic spectrum. Understanding these light curves and spectra are key to using these...

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is finding earlier and brighter sources than expected. In this talk I will explore how these new observations fit (or don’t) within our cosmological and galaxy-formation models. First, I will discuss the...

The distribution of matter on very large scales - the so-called large-scale structure - contains clues, hidden within its statistics, about the origin and evolution of the Universe. While the gravity-only evolution of dark matter can be modelled...

Abstract: Astronomy's current model of galaxy evolution is built on a foundation of hierarchical growth, in which small galaxies merge together to form larger ones.  In addition to the simple accrual of mass, this merging process is predicted to...