Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

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...

We recently detected an isolated stellar-mass black hole (BH) unambiguously for the first time, and measured its mass, distance and velocity. We used HST to carry out precise astrometry of the source star of the long-duration, high-magnification...

The Event Horizon Telescope has allowed us to obtain direct images of two
black holes, the one in the center of the M87 galaxy and the one in the center of the
Milky Way, with horizon-scale resolution, full polarization, and timing information.
In...