Modern astronomical spectrometers are approaching the exquisite
sensitivity to detect the signature of an Earth-mass planet around
stars like the Sun. I shall discuss the challenges involved in
making these difficult measurements with the Doppler...
Magnetic fields of strength ~μG are observed in galaxies today,
but their origin is unknown. A promising scenario is that magnetic
fields larger than 0.1 nG at Mpc scales generated during inflation
were adiabatically compressed during structure...
The surfaces of neutron stars are likely sources of strongly
polarized soft X rays due to the presence of strong magnetic
fields. Scattering transport in the surface layers is critical to
the determination of the emergent anisotropy of light...
High-eccentricity migration is a possible formation channel for
hot Jupiters. However, in order for it to be consistent with the
observed population of planets, tides must circularize the orbits
in an efficient manner. In this talk, I will discuss...
For more than a century now, our inference of the mass
distributions (including dark matter) in galaxies have been based
on modeling the positions and velocities of stars, i.e., using
kinematic analyses, which assume equilibrium. These
kinematic...