Astrophysics Seminars

The merger of binaries consisting of a white dwarf (WD) and a neutron star (NS), though much less studied than their NS-NS/WD-WD brethren, are relatively common astrophysical events which may contribute to the transient sky. I will review the...

In this talk, I will discuss some of the constraints on planetary habitability that are regulated by the host star. The first factor is the role of the stellar wind and stellar flares in driving atmospheric erosion. It will be shown that low-mass M...

Cosmological observations have provided us with answers to age-old questions, involving the age, geometry, and composition of the universe. However, there are profound questions that still remain unanswered. I will describe ongoing efforts to shed...

Our traditional interpretative picture of the internal dynamics of globular clusters has been recently revolutionized by a series of discoveries about their chemical, structural, and kinematic properties. The empirical evidence that their velocity...

NOTE SPECIAL DATE! When the Solar System was formed in a young star cluster a nearby star might have exploded in a supernova. The repercussions of such an event can be rather profound, and the current Solar system may still bear the memory of this...

SPECIAL DATE AND TIME. The Evection is a "regular variation in the eccentricity of the Moon's orbit around the Earth, caused mainly by the Sun's attraction" (O.E.D.). It is the signature of a now weakened resonance between the period of apse...

Fast radio bursts (FRB's) are an exciting, recently discovered, astrophysical transients which their origins are unknown. Currently, these bursts are believed to be coming from cosmological distances, allowing us to probe the electron content on...

More than one-third of the more than 4000 planet candidates found by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft are associated with target stars that have more than one planet candidate, and such “multis” account for the majority of candidates that have been verified...

As a result of the high precision and cadence of surveys like MOST, CoRoT, and Kepler, we may now directly observe the very low-level light variations arising from stellar granulation in cool stars. Here, we discuss how this enables us to more...

This talk will address the preferred mass and time for galaxy formation, in dark-matter haloes similar to that of the Milky way but when the Universe was a few Gigayears old. It is proposed that this is due to the interplay between two mechanisms...