Astrophysics Seminars

Climate change is here and may become catastrophic before the end of the century if we do not transition away from the burning fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy. In this talk we focus on the work of our research team in the thermal...

Approximately a dozen luminous flares located at the centers of their host galaxies have been associated with the tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole. Analytical models of tides make one of two assumptions to make the problem...

Standard accretion disk models fold the physics of magnetic fields and turbulence into a constant viscosity parameter, alpha. Applications such as black hole spin measurements can be sensitive to the details of magnetic fields and turbulence, so...

ABSTRACT: Many irregular astrophysical systems and phenomena are not so rare, and in fact constitute a large fraction of all astrophysical systems. I will discuss several such riregular systems, ranging from irregular moons in the Solar-system...

ABSTRACT: I will present and discuss paleoclimatic data from the past 500 million years. The data exhibits a clear periodicity which is most naturally explained by the vertical oscillations of the solar system perpendicular to the galactic plane. I...

ABSTRACT: The correlation between the masses of central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and the bulge luminosity of their host galaxies ---the SMBH-bulge relation--- is seen as fundamental to understand the formation and (co-)evolution of SMBHs and...