Astrophysics Seminars

The detections of gravitational waves from compact binary mergers and the followup observations of electromagnetic emissions together provide a powerful and independent tool to explore the Universe. With successive upgrades to the LIGO and Virgo...

Gravitational waves (GW) from compact binary coalescences are natural cosmological probes. On the one hand, these standard siren sources provide direct measurements of luminosity distance. In addition, features in the mass distribution, such as mass...

High-eccentricity migration is a possible formation channel for hot Jupiters. However, in order for it to be consistent with the observed population of planets, tides must circularize the orbits in an efficient manner. In this talk, I will discuss...

We believe that supermassive black holes reside at the center of massive galaxies, where they can shine as an active galactic nucleus (AGN) when supplied with gas to accrete.  These black holes are believed to be important for regulating gas cooling...

Finding low-scatter relationships in properties of complex systems (e.g., stars, supernovae, galaxies) is important to gain physical insights into them and/or to estimate their distances/masses. As the size of simulation/observational datasets grow...

Abstract: Pulsar radio emission may be generated in pair discharges which fill the pulsar magnetosphere with plasma as an accelerating electric field is screened by freshly created pairs. In this talk we present a simplified analytic theory for the...

It was suggested over thirty years ago that microscopic black holes can exponentially enhance the decay rate of a metastable false vacuum. The interest in this phenomenon has revived recently due to its possible phenomenological relevance for the...

In this talk, I will briefly discuss our work on understanding the 3D morphology of magnetic fields associated with molecular clouds. To study the 3D magnetic fields, we first proposed and demonstrated a new technique to determine the line-of-sight...

With thousands of known transiting exoplanets, many as small as the Earth, our detection capabilities are beginning to border on that necessary to detect the largest moons found in our solar system. Exomoons would offer new opportunities to...

The orbital evolution of binary systems perturbed by external tidal forces represents one of the oldest problems in celestial mechanics.   Interest in this class of problems has resurged recently due to the discovery of various exotic astrophysical...