Astrophysics Seminars

The history of the Galaxy is imprinted in the kinematics and chemical properties of the stars in the stellar halo. Their study allows us partially to reconstruct the Galactic past because the time required for stars in the halo to exchange their...

The vast data base produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey enables the identification and study of rare objects in sample sizes large enough to investigate their ensemble properties. This talk will include an overview of some of the work on...

A stellar mode achieves approximate energy equipartition with the kinetic energy of convective eddies whose correlation times are comparable to its period. The energies of the most visible modes are similar to those of individual granules, or...

We describe a novel mechanism to generate electromagnetic luminosities powered by a black hole battery in an astrophysical circuit with a neutron-star magnet.

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...