Astrophysics Seminars

Although rare, tidal disruption events, the dismemberment of a star by a massive black hole, are now observable. These events provide a special window on accretion dynamics because they violate many of the standard assumptions: they are...

Protoplanetary disks are the birthplaces of planets but the spatial resolution at long wavelengths has so far been insufficient to resolve the critical 5-30 AU region. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) now allows us to zoom in to nearby...

TITLE AND ABSTRACT UPDATED - The Milky Way's own supermassive black hole SgrA* is our best hope for studying black holes' immediate environments and their growth. Among the wide variety of accretion models, the only thing we know with certainty is...

The Milky Way and a significant fraction of galaxies are observed to host a central Massive Black Hole (MBH) embedded in a non-spherical nuclear star cluster. I will discuss the orbital evolution of stellar binaries in these environments and argue...

I examine the accretion disks which power outbursts in two types of white dwarf binary systems: dwarf novae (DNe) and AM CVns. Accretion disks in these systems are thermally unstable, causing some of the observed variations. The source of "normal...

In this talk, I will discuss several analytic methods for chaotic gravitational dynamics, applied to dense stellar systems. I begin with a statistical mechanics approach to the chaotic four-body problem, which yields distribution functions for the...

NOTE SPECIAL DAY OF WEEK - Protoplanetary disks of gas and dust around young stars are the birth cradles of planets. The study of these disks was for a long time based on unresolved observations, limiting our understanding of planet formation. Of...