IAS/PU Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

We are living in a golden era for testing gravitational physics with precision experiments. This talk will present new results using a variety of tests with radio pulsars. These results will be placed in context of other experiments (including LIGO...

The mechanism of the explosion of massive stars remains uncertain. I will discuss aspects of the critical condition for explosion, the observed supernova diversity, and the connection to gamma-ray bursts and super-luminous supernovae. I will focus...

All the magnetized planets in our solar system, including Earth, produce bright emission at low radio frequencies, predominantly originating in high magnetic latitudes and powered by magnetospheric currents. It has long been speculated that similar...

Equilibrium phase-space models have enabled much of what we know about the structure of the Milky Way, including global or bulk properties of Galactic dark matter. Kinematic data from the recent second data release from the Gaia mission has shown...

The cosmic microwave background contains a wealth of information about cosmology as well as high energy physics. It tells us about the composition and geometry of the universe, the properties of neutrinos, dark matter, and even the conditions in our...

Rapid accretion of matter into either stellar mass or supermassive black holes produces some the most luminous objects in the Universe, such as quasars, ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), and tidal disruption events. Understanding such flows is...

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are a newly discovered astrophysical phenomenon consisting of short (few ms) bursts of radio waves. FRBs occur roughly 1000 times per sky per day. From their dispersion measures, these events are clearly extragalactic and...

With the discovery of a binary neutron star coalescence in gravitational waves, and the discovery of an associated short gamma-ray burst, and the discovery of an associated optical afterglow, we have finally entered the era of gravitational-wave...

Massive black holes, weighing millions to billions of solar masses, inhabit the centers of today's galaxies. Black hole masses typically scale with properties of their hosts, such as bulge mass and velocity dispersion. The progenitors of these black...

Gaia is a perfect halo explorer. It makes up for a relatively shallow depth with an array of features not available to other surveys/telescopes. These include stable photometry, impeccable star/galaxy separation and resilience to artefacts, not to...