Astrophysics Seminar

In this talk, I will review recent progress in understanding the complex multi-scale plasma physics of neutron star magnetospheres through the lens of first-principles particle-in-cell simulations. I will highlight pair production discharges near...

Many modern techniques to analyze global planetary signals, from satellite gravity and the geoid, to magnetic fields, to the making of seismological models, heavily rely on a global function basis - the spherical harmonics. When the available data...

Redshifted 21cm emission from neutral hydrogen is rapidly becoming one of our most powerful observables in cosmology. With it, we can study the evolution of dark energy at low/intermediate redshifts, the epoch of reionization, the first stars in the...

Accretion-powered X-ray pulsars are neutron stars that accrete matter from a companion star in a binary system, which exhibit fascinating dynamics. The strong magnetic field of the neutron star guides material onto the magnetic poles, which are...

Despite the remarkable success of the standard model of cosmology, the lambda CDM model, at predicting the observed structure of the universe over many scales, very little is known about the fundamental nature of its principal constituents: dark...

The albedo of a celestial body is the fraction of incident starlight reflected by it. The study of the albedos of Solar System objects is at least a century old, at least in the Western world. As examples: Bond (1861) speculated on the near-unity...

Charge-exchange (CX) collisions of the solar wind (SW) high-ionization-state minor ions with LISM neutrals are responsible for much of X-ray production in the outer heliosphere. In this talk, we discuss numerical modeling of the heliospheric CX X...

Interpreting observations of extreme astrophysical phenomena requires a detailed understanding of particle acceleration in astrophysical environments. These accelerated particles, known as cosmic rays, approximately follow a power-law distribution...

Gravitational waves have uncovered a treasure trove of nearly 90 merging black holes and neutron stars, each with its own unique story to tell. In this talk, our focus centers on black hole spins, seeking to decipher the secrets hidden within...