Astrophysics Seminars

ABSTRACT: The spatial clustering of distant galaxies is a powerful probe of both the nature of those galaxies and of fundamental physics. The MUSYC collaboration used the connection between galaxies and their dark matter halos to identify distant...

ABSTRACT: Abstract: The interaction between young planets and the gaseous protoplanetary disks from which they form leads to planet migration, gas accretion, and gap opening, each of which can significantly affect exoplanet demographics. Although...

ABSTRACT: The CMB spectrum is known to be extremely close to a perfect blackbody. However, even within standard cosmology several processes occurring in the early Universe lead to distortions of the CMB at a level that might become observable in the...

ABSTRACT: Planetary astrophysics is the most exciting and fastest growing branch of astronomy today. New data obtained from systematic radial velocity surveys and Kepler transit surveys have led to the discovery of over 700 planets and 3000...

ABSTRACT: Methane creates a volatile cycle on Titan akin to the Earth's hydrologic cycle. But why does methane continue to do so after 4.5 billion years of geologic time when it is so unstable against photolysis? I will show how a variety of Cassini...

ABSTRACT: The first results obtained from the Baryon acoustic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey in SDSS-III on large-scale structure using the Lyman alpha forest will be discussed. Thanks to the unprecedentedly large numbers of quasar spectra...

ABSTRACT: Superluminous supernovae can have optical luminosities hundreds of times larger than normal events. I argue that most of these are the result of interaction with dense circumstellar matter and can be viewed as shock breakout in a dense...

ABSTRACT: Dynamical tides, involving the excitation and dissipation of waves and oscillation modes, play an important role in many different binary systems. I will discuss recent works on dynamical tides in three types of systems: (i) Compact...

ABSTRACT: Can we use the Fermi satellite like WMAP? In 2006, S. Ando and I proposed to use anisotropies in the gamma-ray background (not CMB!) as a smoking-gun signature of annihilation of dark matter particles in the universe. The idea is simple...