IAS/PU Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Most of the baryons associated with galaxy halos reside in the circumgalactic medium. A significant fraction of the mass is at temperatures well below the halo virial temperature. What holds the cool CGM up? I will present new measurements of the...

NASA’s GRAIL mission to the Moon was completed in 2012 when both spacecraft were intentionally “de-orbited” (i.e. crashed) into a nearside mountainside. This orbital mission measured tiny variations in the Moon’s gravitational field by continuously...

Until recently the number of "benchmark stars" --- stars having empirically measured radii, masses, and other properties with the few-percent accuracy needed to stringently test stellar models --- was of order 10^1. These crucial stellar benchmarks...

We are living in a golden era for testing gravitational physics with precision experiments. This talk will present new results using a variety of tests with radio pulsars. These results will be placed in context of other experiments (including LIGO...

The mechanism of the explosion of massive stars remains uncertain. I will discuss aspects of the critical condition for explosion, the observed supernova diversity, and the connection to gamma-ray bursts and super-luminous supernovae. I will focus...

All the magnetized planets in our solar system, including Earth, produce bright emission at low radio frequencies, predominantly originating in high magnetic latitudes and powered by magnetospheric currents. It has long been speculated that similar...

Equilibrium phase-space models have enabled much of what we know about the structure of the Milky Way, including global or bulk properties of Galactic dark matter. Kinematic data from the recent second data release from the Gaia mission has shown...

The cosmic microwave background contains a wealth of information about cosmology as well as high energy physics. It tells us about the composition and geometry of the universe, the properties of neutrinos, dark matter, and even the conditions in our...

Rapid accretion of matter into either stellar mass or supermassive black holes produces some the most luminous objects in the Universe, such as quasars, ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), and tidal disruption events. Understanding such flows is...

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are a newly discovered astrophysical phenomenon consisting of short (few ms) bursts of radio waves. FRBs occur roughly 1000 times per sky per day. From their dispersion measures, these events are clearly extragalactic and...