Joint IAS Princeton University Astrophysics Colloquium

The discovery of thousands of new planetary candidates over the last decade has revolutionized the field of planet formation. One of Kepler's key findings is that the most abundant planets in our galaxy, observed to date, are larger than Earth but...

Central massive black holes will reveal themselves in a galaxy when they flicker and flare as they feed on gas and stars. We are conducting a systematic study of nuclear transients in the Zwicky Transient Facility alert stream, and have assembled...

Both cosmological simulations and observations of the ultraviolet luminosity function suggest dwarf galaxies are the dominant population at high redshifts and that the galaxy merger rate per unit volume is dominated by low mass galaxies. However...

There has been a surge of interest within the particle-physics and dark matter communities in axions and axion-like particles (ALPs). These particles result from a possible extensions to the Standard Model that may solve the Strong-CP problem, and...

We are the first generation of human beings able to directly observe and study the cosmic era when the first galaxies and black holes formed. Quasars are among the most luminous sources known and can be studied in detail even during the first...

New technology and a lack of regulation are allowing massive swarms, or "constellations", of low-Earth communications satellites such as SpaceX's Starlinks to be launched at relatively low cost, leading to a dramatic rise in the number of satellites...

Modern astronomical spectrometers are approaching the exquisite sensitivity to detect the signature of an Earth-mass planet around stars like the Sun. I shall discuss the challenges involved in making these difficult measurements with the Doppler...

Relativistic Jets emanating from Black Holes (BH) of active galaxies are believed to be among the most extreme particle accelerators and very high energy (VHE) emitters in the universe. Only lately, combining theory, numerical simulations and...

We develop a general approach to "interpret" what a network has learned by introducing strong inductive biases. In particular, we focus on Graph Neural Networks.
The technique works as follows: we first encourage sparse latent representations when...

Among a handful of mysteries in the LambdaCDM paradigm of cosmology, I focus on three: Dark Matter, Baryogenesis and the origin of structure. I then provide a pedagogical introduction to Chiral Gravity and show how these three mysteries may be...