Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

The center of the Milky Way hosts the closest supermassive black hole and nuclear star cluster to the Earth, offering us the opportunity to study the physics of supermassive black holes and their environment at a level of detail not possible...

It has been nearly 100 years since the "Great Debate," where Heber Curtis correctly argued that Thomas Wright's 1750 ideas about our Milky Way being one of many "galaxies," each a flattish disk of a multitude of stars, was correct. Since then...

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is an international collaboration to observe black holes at horizon-scale resolution. The EHT uses the technique of very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) and submillimeter telescopes all over the globe to perform...

In hundreds of known cases, "gravitational lenses” deflect, distort, and magnify images of galaxies behind them. Lensing can magnify galaxies by factors of 10--100 times, transforming them from objects we can barely detect to bright objects we can...

Planetary systems for in the disks of gas and dust that orbit young stars. In the past few years, very high angular resolution observations of disks in nearby star-forming regions have started to uncover some key signatures of the planet formation...

Supermassive black holes are found in the centers of all massive galaxies, and they are believed to play a major role in regulating the evolution of massive early-type galaxies. The relationships between black hole mass and host galaxy properties...

Understanding cosmic reionization requires the identification and characterization of early sources of hydrogen-ionizing photons. Through a series of intense observational campaigns with Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) aboard Hubble Space Telescope (HST)...

Observations of exoplanets over the past quarter century have shown that the demographics and architectures of planetary systems display a remarkable diversity spanning over four orders of magnitude in mass, separation, and age. Direct imaging has...

Our current view of the interstellar medium (ISM) is as a multiphase environment where magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence affects many key processes that govern the evolution of galactic disks include star formation. In this talk, I shall present...