Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

Anomalous X-ray Pulsars and Soft Gamma-Ray Repeaters (SGRs) are young neutron stars characterized by high X-ray quiescent luminosities, outbursts, and, in the case of SGRs, sporadic giant flares. They are believed to be magnetars, that is neutron...

Saturn’s satellite Enceladus displays a bewildering array of thermal activity. I will describe our attempts to understand these phenomena in terms of tidal heating associated with the 2:1 mean motion resonance between Enceladus and Dione. Then I...

I review the physics of launching, acceleration, and propagation of radiation driven winds. I will consider two kinds of outflows powered by radiation emitted from the AGN central engine: (1) outflows driven from the innermost part of a black hole...

Explorations of the radio sky in the time-domain are an exciting frontier in astrophysics, and one where new observational capabilities will open up new windows on the universe. As one of a new generation of widefield, low-frequency radio telescopes...

The first light of a core-collapse supernova emerges the moment a shock front breaches the stellar photosphere — just after the star has been engulfed by its explosion, and just before it releases its fastest ejecta. Shock emergence is implicated in...

ABSTRACT: The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has recently discovered a diffuse flux of astrophysical neutrinos, neutrinos from beyond the solar system. But how does one collect neutrinos at the South Pole? Why study neutrinos for astronomy? In this...

Deviations from a uniformly expanding universe are of interest in modern cosmology, most particularly because the amplitude of such peculiar motions measures the strength of gravity on scales of roughly 10-100 Mpc. I will review various recent...

After 50 years of dreaming about it, space-based microlensing observations are now underway. A 2014 100-hr Spitzer Pilot Program generated "microlens parallaxes" for dozens of lenses, opening the prospect of measuring the Galactic distribution of...

A combination of sub-mm observations and numerical simulations have the potential to yield direct constraints on the environment of planet formation. After a review of recent observational surprises, I will discuss the implications of our first...

After a basic introduction on how asteroseismology works in practice, we illustrate its application to various kinds of stars of different mass and evolutionary stage. We show how detected oscillation modes allow us to understand details of the...