Astrophysics Seminars

ABSTRACT: I will demonstrate how we can gain powerful insights into the nature of dark matter and dark energy by investigating how they behave in the most energetic environment ever realized: the early Universe. First, I will show how the early...

ABSTRACT: I will describe a new, generic mechanism for realizing a period of slowly-rolling inflation through the use of an analog of 'magnetic drift.' I will focus on a particular realization of this mechanism - Chromo-Natural Inflation - which...

ABSTRACT: I will discuss the Quasars Probing Quasars survey which is a spectroscopic campaign of close, z>2 quasar pairs discovered in SDSS, BOSS, and dedicated follow-up programs. Emphasis of this talk will be on using these pairs to study the...

ABSTRACT: The final stages of the growth of a planet consist of violently energetic impacts, but new observations of the Moon and Mercury indicate that the energy of accretion does not remove all the water and carbon from the growing planet. Models...

ABSTRACT: This talk will be in two parts. The first will be a general summary of why, when and how planets might be expected to have companions (one or more moons or even a large binary companion). The second part will focus on giant impacts as a...