Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

We are living in a golden era for testing gravitational physics with precision experiments. This talk will present new results using a variety of tests with radio pulsars. These results will be placed in context of other experiments (including LIGO...

The mechanism of the explosion of massive stars remains uncertain. I willdiscuss aspects of the critical condition for explosion, the observedsupernova diversity, and the connection to gamma-ray bursts andsuper-luminous supernovae. I will focus on...

All the magnetized planets in our solar system, including Earth, produce bright emission at low radio frequencies, predominantly originating in high magnetic latitudes and powered by magnetospheric currents. It has long been speculated that similar...

Equilibrium phase-space models have enabled much of what we know about the structure of the Milky Way, including global or bulk properties of Galactic dark matter. Kinematic data from the recent second data release from the Gaia mission has shown...

For 13 years, the rich suite of scientific investigations onboard the Cassini spacecraft was brought to bear on everything in the Saturn system -- its atmosphere, magnetosphere, enormous rings, and retinue of moons. This presentation will highlight...

The cosmic microwave background contains a wealth of information about cosmology as well as high energy physics. It tells us about the composition and geometry of the universe, the properties of neutrinos, dark matter, and even the conditions in our...

Rapid accretion of matter into either stellar mass or supermassive black holes produces some the most luminous objects in the Universe, such as quasars, ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), and tidal disruption events. Understanding such flows is...

In the past couple of years the gravitational-wave detections enabled by the LIGO detectors have launched a new field in astrophysics allowing us to study compact object mergers involving pairs of black holes and neutron stars. I will discuss what...

The first billion years is a pivotal time for cosmic structure formation. The galaxies and black holes that form then shape and influence all future generations of stars and black holes. Understanding and detecting the the first galaxies and black...