Astrophysics Seminar

More than a century ago, Albert Einstein presented his general theory of gravitation. One of the predictions of this theory is that not only particles and objects with mass, but also the quanta of light, photons, are tied to the curvature of space...

While the vast majority of the light from our galaxy comes from the Galactic disk, the vast majority of the mass of the Milky Way (MW) is in its dark matter halo. Because we cannot directly observe the MW's dark matter halo, we must use luminous...

Recent observations reveal that cosmic rays (CRs) are more tightly confined in various astrophysical systems (e.g. radio bubbles) than current theories predict. I show that microscale magnetic fluctuations, particularly from the mirror instability...

I will discuss a new method for analyzing the morphology of supernova remnants (SNRs) by using power specula analysis to diagnose the drivers responsible for structure at different angular scales. Using a suite of hydrodynamic models of the Rayleigh...

The cosmic history of galaxy formation is the history of star formation writ large.  Some of the most important processes affecting galaxy evolution involve coupling between stellar and gaseous components, since massive stars are the primary energy...

Despite the apparent complexity of galaxies, some of their most basic properties (mass M, binding energy E, angular momentum J, etc) obey simple power-law scaling relations. Such relations provide some of the clearest insights into galaxy formation...

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detector network has observed over 70 gravitational-wave sources to date, including mergers between black holes, neutron stars, and mixed neutron star-black holes. Focusing on the black hole mergers, I will describe some recent...

The Milky Way contains of order 10^8 stellar-mass black holes (BHs). Yet, fewer than 100 BH candidates are known, and only about 20 are dynamically confirmed. Our view of the BH population has been shaped almost entirely by observations of X-ray...

Star-shredding supermassive black holes (Tidal Disruption Events, TDEs) are potential emitters of high energy hadrons and neutrinos. Several TDEs have been observed as coincident with neutrino events detected at the IceCube neutrino observatory. I...

Recent horizon-scale images of Messier 87* and Sagittarius A* have been used to demonstrate that their spacetimes are well-described by the Kerr metric. The latter is a solution to the vacuum Einstein equations of general relativity, and is used to...