School of Natural Sciences

http://www.ias.edu/sns/~seminar/colloquia.shtml

In this lecture, Tegmark surveys how humans have repeatedly underestimated not only the size of the cosmos, but also the power of the human mind to understand it using mathematical equations. He explores how mathematics in physics has allowed us to...

Jo Bovy, John N. Bahcall Fellow in the School of Natural Sciences, talks about stars, planets, and gases that make up galaxies, the dark matter that holds them together, and the history of our own Milky Way galaxy in this talk geared for children...

The increasing role of general relativity in the dynamics of stellar systems with central massive black holes, in the generation of extreme mass-ratio inspirals, and in the evolution of hierarchical triple systems inspires a close examination of how...

http://www.ias.edu/sns/~seminar/colloquia.shtml

Planetesimals are the building blocks of planets. They can be traced by the dust they produce in collisions or sublimation that forms a debris disk. In the solar system, such a dust disk is produced by the asteroids, comets and Kuiper Belt objects...

We know that most stars, if not all, were once surrounded by protoplanetary disks. How these young disks evolve into planetary systems is a fundamental question in astronomy. Observations of T Tauri stars (TTS) may provide insights into this...

The NASA Kepler Mission has demonstrated that planets with radii larger than Earth yet smaller than Neptune are common around Sun-like stars. Although Kepler has determined the physical sizes of hundreds of such planets, we know virtually nothing...

Hanno Rein, former Member (2010–13) in the School of Natural Sciences, discusses using biosignatures to find signs of life, both in the Solar System and beyond. Additionally, Rein explains why chances are good for finding an Earth-like exoplanet...

Hydrogen recombination at redshifts z ~ 1100 - 1500 leads to the rapid decrease of the optical depth of the Universe due to Thomson scattering. As a result CMB photons previously strongly coupled with baryonic matter become free and able to reach...