Astrophysics Seminars

Misaligned disks in binaries were commonly thought to evolve to a coplanar
state. However, recent theory and observations have surprisingly shown that disks around
eccentric orbit binaries can evolve to a polar state in which the disk is...

RESCHEDULED to Friday, October 28

Galaxy formation in the first billion years mark a time of great upheaval in our cosmic history: the first sources of light in the Universe, these galaxies ended the 'cosmic dark ages' and produced the first...

RESCHEDULED to Friday, October 28

Galaxy formation in the first billion years mark a time of great upheaval in our cosmic history: the first sources of light in the Universe, these galaxies ended the 'cosmic dark ages' and produced the first...

Galaxy clusters are the most massive gravitationally self-bound objects in the Universe. These clusters form at the rare high peaks of the primordial density fluctuations, and they subsequently trace the growth of structure in the Universe as they...

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are the brightest radio transients in the universe. Since the unexpected discovery in the 21st century, their extreme nature is one of the biggest mysteries of astrophysics. FRBs are also unique probes of the universe...

One of the strongest predictions of the standard cold dark matter paradigm is the hierarchy of structure down to Earth-mass scales.  However, individual self-bound clumps of dark matter--"halos"--are difficult to detect directly.  Instead, we use...

Large-area surveys such as Gaia have given us an unprecedented amount of data on stars in the Milky Way. One of the largest ongoing challenges in understanding the present-day structure and formation history of our Galaxy (i.e. Galactic archaeology)...

Astronomical observations indicate that coherent, dynamically important magnetic fields are ubiquitous in the Universe. However, neither the origin problem -- what are the physical mechanisms that generate the initial ``seed'' magnetic fields —- nor...

Gravity plays the central role in structure formation and evolution in astronomical scales. Despite the apparently simple inverse square law for the gravitational force in the non-relativistic regime, the dynamics of self-gravitating many-body...

Our understanding of astrophysical black holes is predicated on the Kerr solution to Einstein’s equations. A promising avenue for testing the Kerr hypothesis is to detect the shadow a black hole casts on the surrounding emission and compare its size...