Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

We are entering an extremely data-rich era in the next decade, with full 6D+chemistry information on dozens of stellar streams, to shape our understanding on the chemo-dynamical evolution of the Milky Way, as well as the nature of the dark matter...

Astronomical transients are signposts of catastrophic events in space, including the most extreme stellar deaths, stellar tidal disruptions by supermassive black holes, and mergers of compact objects. Thanks to new and improved observational...

The birth of stars is one of the most complex problems challenging modern astrophysics. Understanding their origins is of fundamental importance to many areas of astronomy, from exoplanet studies to cosmology. While the study of the initial...

The study of the transient night sky offers an opportunity to tackle some long-standing open questions in astrophysics, such as: how and why do stars explode? when do such explosions leave behind neutrons stars or black holes? and what is the origin...

The Milky Way's satellite dwarf galaxies are powerful probes of many important astrophysical processes. Their kinematics provide insights into galactic dynamics and the nature of dark matter, while their chemical compositions preserve a history of...

The centers of massive galaxies are special in many ways, not least because apparently all of them host supermassive black holes. Since the discovery of a number of relations linking the mass of this central black hole to the large scale properties...

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...