Events

"Observing Black Holes from the Stratosphere"

Mayukh is currently a PhD candidate in Astronomy at Queen's University, Canada, working with Prof. Laura Fissel on the Balloon-borne VLBI Experiment (BVEX). His research focuses on developing balloon-borne radio telescopes for Very Long Baseline Interferometry.

Felix Thiel currently is a PhD student in the Department of Physics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario Canada and a member of the Balloon-borne VLBI Experiment (BVEX) collaboration under the supervision of Laura Fissel.

At Astronomy on Tap this month, we'll be hearing all about the science of black holes from two experts studying these structures. Everett Patterson will tell us how astronomers and cosmologists reached our modern understanding of black holes from their theoretical origins, and Kiana Salehi, a member of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, will discuss what we can learn about our Universe from photographing a black hole.

Black holes are massive objects from which even light cannot escape -- so how can we "see" them? In this month's KPL astronomy talk, Lucy Pothier-Bogoslowski  will discuss several observational techniques and properties of black holes that allow us to observe them and their impact on their environments from small to large scales.

"Tracing Dark matter halos and their boundaries"

Susmita Adhikari obtained her PhD in Astronomy at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. After her PhD she was a Postdoctoral fellow at The Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University. She then spent a year as a postdoc in a joint position between the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at The University of Chicago & Fermilab before she moved to IISER Pune.

Astronomers today have access to telescopes that orbit Earth, or that have extremely large mirrors, allowing us to study the furthest corners of the Universe. In this month's KPL astronomy talk, Dr. Ana Ennis will discuss the foundational optics that led to the invention of the telescope, and in particular, the stories of the people that contributed to it. From ancient civilizations to the current era, we will see how the designs and functionalities of telescopes have evolved, and how exactly we came to have the amazing instruments that are available today.

"Optimal weak lensing and galaxy clustering analysis with field-level inference"

Supranta Boruah is a Center for Particle Cosmology fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on developing statistical and machine learning methods for cosmological analysis. 

Rachel Bezanson is Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She is an observational astronomer interested in empirical studies of massive galaxies, both today and in the early Universe. Her research aims to disentangle and interpret the morphological, structural, and dynamical evolution of massive galaxies through cosmic time. She is interested in understanding how and when galaxies form, how star-forming galaxies turn off - or “quench” - their star-formation, and the physical processes that drive the evolution of early galaxies into the bimodal and well-behaved galaxy populations observed in the local Universe.

The Universe is vast and ever expanding in its range, so how do we measure large cosmic distances accurately? In this month's KPL astronomy talk, Ethan Smith will discuss the cosmic distance ladder, and how a series of overlapping methods and astronomical objects can be used to measure cosmic distances from local stars to deep space.

At Astronomy on Tap this month, we'll be hearing all about the James Webb Space Telescope -- Owen Lammert will talk about studying the atmospheres of molten lava planets with JWST, and Liza Sazonova will talk about "little red dots" and "black hole stars", some of the most distant, extreme objects in our Universe.