Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

The high and dry desert of the Chilean Andes is a magnificent site from which to observe the universe.  The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) made measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from there for fifteen years, with a series of...

The origins of the millisecond-duration, energetic (>10^39 erg) fast radio bursts (FRBs) at extragalactic distances remain shrouded in mystery. Although FRBs are likely associated with neutron stars, they appear to occur in a remarkable diversity of...

By precisely measuring the motions stars on the sky over time, the Gaia mission is conducting a comprehensive census of the Milky Way's binary stars. These data are transformative both for population modeling and for discovery of rare objects. I...

Machine learning methods are having a huge impact in astrophysics. However, ML has a strong ontology — in which only the data exist — and a strong epistemology — in which a model is considered good if and only if it performs well on held-out...

Based on latest state of the art general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations, I will discuss how black holes feast on the surrounding gas, burp away their surroundings, and produce bright emission in a wide range of contexts, ranging from...

We present results from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Prime Extragalactic Areas and Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) program in the direction of galaxy clusters, from the spectacle of "first light" observations to the scene of vast...

What we cannot create, we do not understand." Can we understand enough about climate and ecosystems to build them on other planets (and exoplanets)? A necessary, but insufficient, first step for making Mars's surface suitable for life would be to...

The discovery of numerous relatively close planets orbiting low-mass stars signals a major planetary population that may be the primary environment explored in the search for life beyond the Solar System. The environments of these types of stars are...

Since the revolutionary discovery of gravitational wave (GW) emission from a binary black hole merger in 2015, the remarkable GW detectors LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA have detected at least ninety compact object mergers. These events are transforming...

Quasars at cosmic dawn are powerful probes to the formation and growth of early supermassive black holes in the universe, their connections to high-redshift galaxy and structure formation, and the evolution of the intergalactic medium at the epoch...