Astrophysics

Type Ia supernovae involve the thermonuclear detonation of white dwarf stars, and are an essential tool allowing us to study the Universe on vast scales. However, Type Ia supernovae are not the only byproducts of the mergers at the endpoints of...

Large-area surveys such as Gaia have given us an unprecedented amount of data on stars in the Milky Way. One of the largest ongoing challenges in understanding the present-day structure and formation history of our Galaxy (i.e. Galactic archaeology)...

The Bahcall Lunch follow the astrophysics colloquium lecture. Registration is required by 3pm the previous Friday so a meal can be provided. Please contact Amanda Cenker with questions.

After decades of preparation, the era of gravitational wave astronomy has begun. The gravitational wave detectors, LIGO and Virgo, have published a catalog of 90 events of coalescing compact objects including black holes and neutron stars. I will...

Abstract: In holographic duality an eternal AdS black hole is described by two copies of the boundary CFT in the thermal field double state. We provide explicit constructions in the boundary theory of infalling time evolutions which can take bulk...

Astronomical observations indicate that coherent, dynamically important magnetic fields are ubiquitous in the Universe. However, neither the origin problem -- what are the physical mechanisms that generate the initial ``seed'' magnetic fields —- nor...

The proximity of the Galactic Center makes it unique for studying the
interactions that take place between the interstellar medium, the
stars and the supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei.  The galactic
supermassive black hole is not very...

The Bahcall Lunch follow the astrophysics colloquium lecture. Registration is required by 3pm the previous Friday so a meal can be provided. Please contact Amanda Cenker with questions.

A primary scientific outcome of the Apollo program was the giant impact theory for lunar origin, in which a collision at the end of Earth’s main accretionary phase creates a disk from which the Moon forms.  In the past decade, the nature of a Moon...

Abstract: Recently, the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA scientific collaboration reported the detection of nearly 80 gravitational wave sources, with the majority of them being binary black holes. The increased number of binary black hole observations allow...