Astrophysics Seminars

The Kepler survey has revolutionized the field of exoplanets by its discovery of thousands of transiting planet candidates. However, translating the Kepler discoveries into knowledge about the underlying demographics of exoplanets is a non-trivial...

I will discuss how sound waves racing through the cosmos during the first million years of the Universe provide a robust method for measuring the low-redshift cosmological distance scale and thereby the properties of dark energy. The distance that...

Describing the large-scale behavior of weakly collisional magnetized plasmas, such as the solar wind, hot accretion flows, or the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters, necessitates a detailed understanding of the kinetic-scale physics governing...

I will review the recent "ultra-bright" GRB 130427A data and the puzzles (as well as non-puzzles) raised by its intepretation both in terms of the standard model and in terms of previous plausible extensions of this model. I then discuss the...

I will describe recent work on the observable signatures of compact object birth in two situations. The first scenario is the coalescence of binary neutron stars, the primary source for the direct detection of gravitational waves by Advanced LIGO....

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) has mapped the microwave sky to arcminute scales. Efficient map-making and spectrum-estimation techniques allow us to probe the acoustic peaks deep into the damping tail, and allow for confirmation of the...

ABSTRACT: Clusters of Galaxies are the largest gravitationally-bound objects in the Universe. They form via mergers with energetics that are only rivaled by the Big Bang. The study of these objects and collisions can reveal the complex processes...