Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

The study of the transient night sky offers an opportunity to tackle some long-standing open questions in astrophysics, such as: how and why do stars explode? when do such explosions leave behind neutrons stars or black holes? and what is the origin...

The Milky Way's satellite dwarf galaxies are powerful probes of many important astrophysical processes. Their kinematics provide insights into galactic dynamics and the nature of dark matter, while their chemical compositions preserve a history of...

The centers of massive galaxies are special in many ways, not least because apparently all of them host supermassive black holes. Since the discovery of a number of relations linking the mass of this central black hole to the large scale properties...

We currently know of more than 10,000 planets and planet candidates orbiting nearby stars.  This population is dominated by planets with masses between 1-10 times that of the Earth, which can be divided into two broad classes (‘sub-Neptunes’ and...

I will discuss recent and ongoing work focused on attempts to restore concordance amongst cosmological data sets, motivated by discrepancies amongst some inferences of the cosmic expansion rate (H_0) and the matter clustering amplitude (S_8).  I...

The exchange of baryons between galaxies and their surrounding intergalactic medium (IGM) is a crucial but poorly constrained aspect of galaxy formation and evolution. I will present results from the Keck Baryonic Structure Survey (KBSS) and the...

For more than a decade, enigmatic extragalactic flashes called fast radio bursts (FRBs) have defied a definitive explanation for their origin. In addition, the unique properties of FRBs make them promising probes of both cosmology and the...

Understanding the physics of galaxy formation is an outstanding problem in modern astrophysics. Recent cosmological simulations have demonstrated that feedback by star formation, supernovae and active galactic nuclei appears to be critical in...

Turbulence is a near ubiquitous feature of fluids and plasmas in geospace, the heliosphere and in astrophysics and well as in laboratory plasma and in the terrestrial environment. Turbulence links large scale energy reservoirs with small scale...

How magnetized turbulent plasmas can accelerate charged particles to high energies represents a long-standing question with far-reaching implications for high-energy and multi-messenger astrophysics. It indeed goes back to the seminal works of...