IAS/PU Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Planetary systems are shaped as much by destructive processes --- N-body instabilities, catastrophic impacts, and atmospheric loss --- as by accretionary ones. We examine the histories of violence written in: (a) the orbital architectures of super...

The recent breakthrough in the detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from merging black hole (BH) and neutron star (NS) binaries by advanced LIGO/Virgo has generated renewed interest in understanding the formation mechanisms of merging compact...

We find ourselves at a pivotal era in the study of cosmology and galaxy formation. The dark energy + cold dark matter (ΛCDM) paradigm is firmly established as the default cosmological model, owing in large part to its incredible success in...

We used more than 25 million galaxies in the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) shear catalog in the redshift range up to z~1.5 to measure weak lensing distortion effects due to large-scale structures. We used the measured weak lensing signals to...

All large-scale structure cosmologists are faced with the question: how do we robustly extract cosmological information, such as on dark energy, gravity, and inflation, from observed tracers such as galaxies whose astrophysics is extremely complex...

Planets form from disks of dust and gas surrounding young stars.  As they grow, these new planets inherit their chemical composition from the surrounding material and then sculpt it through gravitational interactions to form gaps and other...

I will weave three separate threads. The first will be to describe recent and ongoing results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Survey. I will present the BAO results from the early DESI data, and some of the preparatory work for the Year 1 data. I...

The iconic spiral arms that decorate the disks of massive galaxies (like our own Milky Way) have been studied observationally and theoretically since they were first recorded 180 years ago, nevertheless the exact details of their nature remains...

Exoplanet systems are expected to evolve with time as they age. In most cases though, the dynamical evolution of exoplanet systems over billion-year timescales are hard to observe. I'll describe how Galactic kinematics can provide accurate and...

In the inner Milky Way stars trek together in a bar-shaped, rotating overdensity: the central bar, which dominates the inner disc out half-way to the Sun. The rotation velocity/pattern speed of this bar has been intensely debated. The best insight...