Astrophysics Seminar

The identity of dark matter remains a mystery, despite decades of theorizing and detection efforts. This includes the mechanism for its primordial production, its interactions with itself or with visible matter, and the very nature of dark matter...

I will discuss how black holes can become nature's laboratories for ultralight axions. When a boson's Compton wavelength is comparable to the horizon size of a black hole, energy and angular momentum from the black hole are converted into...

A key discovery from the past six decades of solar system exploration is that liquid water oceans may be a common planetary phenomenon. At least six ice-covered moons of the outer solar system present compelling evidence for subsurface oceans, and...

Galaxy surveys, which observe the positions and shapes of galaxies across large areas of the sky, can map a significant fraction of our cosmic volume. With the recent or imminent start of several next-generation projects — including LSST, Euclid...

In this talk I will describe recent progress in applying tools from collider physics to problems in classical general relativity. This program has produced state-of-the-art calculations of the conservative two-body Hamiltonian at the fourth order in...

Core-collapse supernovae (CCSN) are efficient laboratories to explore physics beyond the standard model (SM). In particular, they have been used to put strong constraints on axion and axion like particles, and on many other motivated extensions of...

The detections of gravitational waves from compact binary mergers and the followup observations of electromagnetic emissions together provide a powerful and independent tool to explore the Universe. With successive upgrades to the LIGO and Virgo...

High-eccentricity migration is a possible formation channel for hot Jupiters. However, in order for it to be consistent with the observed population of planets, tides must circularize the orbits in an efficient manner. In this talk, I will discuss...

We believe that supermassive black holes reside at the center of massive galaxies, where they can shine as an active galactic nucleus (AGN) when supplied with gas to accrete.  These black holes are believed to be important for regulating gas cooling...