Astrophysics Seminars

The direct detection of relic neutrinos from the Big Bang is one of the greatest challenges in experimental particle physics. The basic concepts were laid out in a paper by Steven Weinberg in 1962. At that time the tritium endpoint spectrum...

The distribution of mass within the Milky Way halo is an important but largely unknown quantity. Stellar streams of Galactic satellites, such as the Sagittarius stream, offer a possibility to infer the Galactic mass distribution. Such streams trace...

The clustering of galaxies in ongoing and upcoming galaxy surveys contains a wealth of cosmological information. Extracting this information is a non-trivial task since galaxies and their host haloes are stochastic tracers of the non-linear matter...

Some of the fundamental processes involved in the assembly of planetary systems are just now becoming accessible to astronomical observations of circumstellar disks. The new promise of observational work in the field of planet formation makes for a...

Galaxy clusters are filled with a hot, tenuous plasma known as the intracluster medium, or ICM. I will discuss recent work aimed at understanding how the plasma can cool to form multi-phase gas, and what implications this cooling has for the...

ABSTRACT: The two-player iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game has been used for 30 years to model evolution, especially the emergence of cooperation. But it still holds surprises, even in the simplest case where the game can be modeled as two simple...

Infrared spectroscopic observations of the stretching and bending modes of aliphatic and aromatic compounds are now seen throughout the Universe, from the diffuse interstellar medium of the Milky Way Galaxy to distant galaxies. Observations of...

ABSTRACT: Extrasolar moons may be frequent, temperate abodes for life and their detection would not only have astrobiological significance but would also greatly further our understanding of planet/moon formation theories. For the first time, the...

The recent claims of a gamma-ray line in the Galactic center at 130 GeV has generated excitement, not least because it could be a signal of dark matter annihilation. I will summarize the current state of the observations of the Galactic center...