I’ll discuss an old technique called intensity interferometry,
pioneered by Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) that allows us to
achieve sub-microarcsecond angular resolution using ordinary
ground-based optical telescopes observing visible light.
This...
In this talk I will review the current state of and future
prospects for exoplanet demographics. I will walk through the
latest understanding of the frequency of Earth-like planets from
Kepler, and their implications for NASA’s next flagship
mission...
Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies present
unsolved theoretical challenges for our understanding of
high-energy astrophysics, gravity and gravitational waves, star and
galaxy formation, and space plasma physics. For decades, our...
More than a century ago, Albert Einstein presented his general
theory of gravitation. One of the predictions of this theory is
that not only particles and objects with mass, but also the quanta
of light, photons, are tied to the curvature of space...
While the vast majority of the light from our galaxy comes from
the Galactic disk, the vast majority of the mass of the Milky Way
(MW) is in its dark matter halo. Because we cannot directly observe
the MW's dark matter halo, we must use luminous...
Recent observations reveal that cosmic rays (CRs) are more
tightly confined in various astrophysical systems (e.g. radio
bubbles) than current theories predict. I show that microscale
magnetic fluctuations, particularly from the mirror
instability...
I will discuss a new method for analyzing the morphology of
supernova remnants (SNRs) by using power specula analysis to
diagnose the drivers responsible for structure at different angular
scales. Using a suite of hydrodynamic models of the Rayleigh...
The cosmic history of galaxy formation is the history of star
formation writ large. Some of the most important processes
affecting galaxy evolution involve coupling between stellar and
gaseous components, since massive stars are the primary
energy...
Despite the apparent complexity of galaxies, some of their most
basic properties (mass M, binding energy E, angular momentum J,
etc) obey simple power-law scaling relations. Such relations
provide some of the clearest insights into galaxy formation...
