Astrophysics

The albedo of a celestial body is the fraction of incident starlight reflected by it. The study of the albedos of Solar System objects is at least a century old, at least in the Western world. As examples: Bond (1861) speculated on the near-unity...

The Bahcall Lunch follow the astrophysics colloquium lecture. Registration is required by 6pm the previous Thursday so a meal can be provided. Email Amanda at cenker@ias.edu with questions.

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...

Abstract: Earlier this year NANOGrav, along with other pulsar timing arrays, announced strong evidence for a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background at nanohertz frequencies.  For decades, such a signal has been predicted from binaries of...

The effective field theory of large-scale structure allows for a consistent perturbative bias expansion of the rest-frame galaxy density field. In this talk, I present a systematic approach to renormalize galaxy bias and stochastic parameters using...

Currently, our best window into the composition of exoplanets relies on the synergy of precise radii, mass, and stellar elemental abundance. The latter two measurements have been enabled chiefly by high resolution, ground-based spectroscopy of which...

Each week, we hold a relatively informal seminar/discussion series with an emphasis on extra-galactic and large-scale structure astrophysics.

During Galread a leader/visitor presents a recent paper to the discussion group. The PDF of the paper is...

Abstract: The Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity described all superconductors until the 1986 discovery of the high-temperature counterpart in the cuprate ceramic materials.  This discovery has challenged conventional wisdom...