Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

Machine learning methods are having a huge impact in astrophysics. However, ML has a strong ontology — in which only the data exist — and a strong epistemology — in which a model is considered good if and only if it performs well on held-out...

Based on latest state of the art general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations, I will discuss how black holes feast on the surrounding gas, burp away their surroundings, and produce bright emission in a wide range of contexts, ranging from...

We present results from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Prime Extragalactic Areas and Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) program in the direction of galaxy clusters, from the spectacle of "first light" observations to the scene of vast...

What we cannot create, we do not understand." Can we understand enough about climate and ecosystems to build them on other planets (and exoplanets)? A necessary, but insufficient, first step for making Mars's surface suitable for life would be to...

The discovery of numerous relatively close planets orbiting low-mass stars signals a major planetary population that may be the primary environment explored in the search for life beyond the Solar System. The environments of these types of stars are...

Since the revolutionary discovery of gravitational wave (GW) emission from a binary black hole merger in 2015, the remarkable GW detectors LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA have detected at least ninety compact object mergers. These events are transforming...

Quasars at cosmic dawn are powerful probes to the formation and growth of early supermassive black holes in the universe, their connections to high-redshift galaxy and structure formation, and the evolution of the intergalactic medium at the epoch...

Supernovae, tidal disruption events and merging neutron stars can provide a wealth of physical insights from nuclear physics to cosmology; they can teach us about the creation of the elements, the formation of compact objects, accretion processes...

Over a five-year period, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will spectroscopically classify nearly 40 million galaxies and quasars over 1/3 of the sky and to redshifts z 3.5. The DESI collaboration has completed measurements of the...

The possibility that some of the black holes in the universe have a non-stellar origin and that they play a significant role in cosmology - including being some or all of the dark matter - is both timely and intriguing. I will review the status of...