Events

Astronomy Seminar Series

Arnaud De-Mattia, CEA Saclay

In this talk I will present the clustering analysis of the ELG (Emission Line Galaxy) sample from the eBOSS (extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) program of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and review the other clustering analyses of the eBOSS program, dedicated to Luminous Red Galaxies and Quasars. I will discuss theoretical, observational and analysis systematics, how they were estimated and mitigated, focusing on the improvements over the last release of the BOSS program in 2016.

Phys10 Undergraduate Seminar Series

Alan Jamison, Department of Physics & Astronomy and IQC

I will begin by describing how we use a collection of high power lasers to cool a hot atomic beam from 1000K to 1nK. At such ultracold temperatures all thermal motion has ceased, making quantum mechanical effects dominate. One example of this behavior is the Bose-Einstein condensation transition, which sees thousands or even millions of atoms occupy the same quantum state, bringing quantum behavior to relatively large scales where it may be directly observed.

Astronomy Seminar Series

Sharon Morsink

Neutron stars are tiny stars with ultra-strong magnetic and gravitational fields and densities larger than nuclear. Their small size and large average densities allow them to spin at very rapid rates, with surface velocities that are a large fraction of the speed of light.

CANCELLED

Astronomy Seminar Series

Brenda Frye, University of Arizona

Galaxy clusters as astronomical tools generally offer two advantages:  to boost the brightnesses of objects in the background, and to study the dark matter in the lens.  We can now introduce a third use: to unveil properties of the underlying dark matter by the detection of caustic crossing events which can yield magnification factors of 10,000 or more.  We review the approach to detect a new set of massive objects such as galaxy clusters by their rest-frame far-infrared colors (and not by th

Astronomy Seminar Series

Ramesh Narayan, Harvard University

Accretion disks around black holes are the power source behind many luminous and powerful astrophysical systems, for example, X-ray binaries and active galactic nuclei. The well-known thin disk model does a good job of explaining many accreting black hole systems, but the model is limited to sub-Eddington accretion rates. Can a black hole accrete at a super-Eddington rate? If yes, do we observe such systems, and do they have unique observational signatures?

Astronomy Seminar Series

Gwen Eadie, University of Toronto

Astrostatistics is an interdisciplinary field that lives on the boundary between astronomy and statistics. This interdisciplinary field seeks to answer fundamental science questions about the universe while simultaneously inspiring new and improved statistical methods for data analysis. In this talk, I will introduce two areas of my research in astrostatistics. The first covers hierarchical Bayesian analysis in the context of the Milky Way Galaxy, applied to data from the Gaia satellite and others.

Astronomy Seminar Series

Chang-Goo Kim, Princeton University

Developing a theoretical understanding of star formation and galactic-scale winds from first principles is the major hurdle to build a truly predictive galaxy formation theory. Stars are born in the interstellar medium (ISM) as a consequence of the competition between gravity and turbulent, magnetic, and thermal pressure forces.

Phys10 Undergraduate Seminar Series

Miriam Diamond

CANCELLED

Astronomy Seminar Series

Will Kinney, University of Buffalo, SUNY

Recent developments in String Theory center on the idea of the "Swampland", which is defined as the set of low-energy effective theories which do not have any counterpart in a complete theory of quantum gravity. I will provide a pedagogical introduction to the Swampland concept, with a particular focus on implications for cosmology. There may be some snark.

Phys10 Undergraduate Seminar Series - on Teams

Latham Boyle
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Over the past half-century, physicists have established the "standard model" of particle physics, which does a spectacular job of passing (nearly) all of the tests to which it has been subjected.  But some of the most basic patterns in this model remain unexplained.  Dr. Latham Boyle will introduce a few of these patterns, and some ideas for how to understand them, along with relating to a remarkable mathematical object called "exceptional Jordan Algebra".