Astrophysics Seminars

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...

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...