Events

On April 8, Southern Ontario will witness a total solar eclipse for the first time in nearly 100 years, as the Moon blocks out the light of the Sun for several minutes. Total eclipses are an amazing spectacle, but have also played a key role throughout history in our understanding of science. At this month's KPL astronomy talk, Dr. Roan Haggar will speak about the upcoming solar eclipse, and what eclipses have taught us about the Sun, our Solar System, and the Universe.

Kollmeier joined the staff at Carnegie Institution for Science in 2008 and is the Founding Director of the Carnegie Theoretical Astrophysics Center.  In 2017 she assumed the position of Director of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Phase 5 (SDSS-V) which is a robotic spectroscopic exploration of the sky in optical and near-IR bands.  From 2021-2024 she was the Director of Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA).

Shokoufeh Faraji is a Postdoc in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Waterloo Center for Astrophysics at the University of Waterloo. She finished her PhD at ZARM Institute at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her research areas include but not limited to the general theory of relativity, accretion discs, and quasi-periodic oscillations with (semi-) analytical methods. 

This month we'll hear from two University of Waterloo astronomers, researching the evolution of galaxies. Cam Morgan will speak about how the cosmic neighbourhood of galaxies impacts their life cycles, and Cam Lawlor-Forsyth will share how astronomers are using super-computers to learn more about galaxies than ever before.

Canada has made significant contributions ever since the early days of space-based astronomy, and now the prospect of a flagship Canadian-led space telescope as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is alive and well. At this month's KPL astronomy talk, Cam Morgan will speak about the CASTOR mission, an ultra-violet telescope that promises to compliment other cutting-edge missions, such as Euclid and the Roman Space Telescope, throughout the 2030s.

Niko Šarčević is a cosmologist working at Newcastle University, and is part of the LSST DESC. Her research focuses on modelling and mitigating the intrinsic alignment of galaxies in weak lensing measurements. Niko is also interested in the statistical problems for late-time cosmology.

Special Grad student practice talk session!

Cam Morgan will talk about "Decoding quenching in the Virgo cluster and infalling groups with spatially resolved star formation".

Darshak Patel will talk about "Early UNIONS Results: Dependence of Halo Mass on Galaxy Size at Fixed Stellar Mass, Colour, and Redshift".

Alice Chen will present her poster titled "Predicting Halo Location on Non-linear Scales using Galaxies and Neighbouring Halos".

Lucas Valenzuela is interested in galaxy formation and evolution, and how present-day properties of galaxies can be used as indicators for their formation history. To study these, he works on cosmological hydrodynamical simulations and models of globular clusters and planetary nebulae, which he also uses to compare with observations. 

This workshop aims to summarise and expand our knowledge of AGN feedback, and celebrate Brian McNamara's landmark achievements in our field. More than twenty experts in the field will speak about the hot topics and future directions of AGN feedback in clusters and galaxies.

Dark energy is a strange and enigmatic form of energy, causing our Universe to grow and expand at an increasingly fast rate. While the exact nature of this energy remains a total mystery, new astronomical instruments are shedding light on dark energy like never before. Join us at this month's KPL astronomy talk, when Dr. Enrique Paillas will speak about the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), and what its newest results tell us about the dark Universe.