Past Colloquia
Galaxy Evolution from Nearby Resolved Galaxies
Cody Hall, AB 107
Karen Masters (Haverford College)
October 31, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
The morphology of a galaxy provides information on the orbits of stars within it. As such, important clues to the formation history of galaxies is revealed by their morphologies, and this information is complimentary, but not identical to, their star formation history and chemical composition…
Metal-poor stars and the Pristine Survey
Cody Hall, AB 107
Kim Venn (University of Victoria)
October 24, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Metal-poor stars are one of the best ways to probe the early epochs in the Universe since they presumably formed before significant star formation could pollute the pristine gas. I will present results from a new survey to find these rare stars using a narrow-band…
An Inclusive View of Planetary Systems
Cody Hall, AB 107
Wei Zhu (CITA, University of Toronto)
October 17, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Similar to our solar system, extra-solar systems likely also contain a diversity of planets, and planets around the same star likely have (or had) interactions with each other. Therefore, the relations of planets inside the same system conveys important clues on their origin and evolution…
Galactic Dynamics with Gaia DR2
Cody Hall, AB 107
Daisuke Kawata (Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL)
October 03, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has made the 2nd data release (Gaia DR2) on 25th April 2018. Gaia DR2 provides position, parallax and proper motions for more than one billion stars with unprecedented accuracy and radial velocity for about 7 million bright stars. In this…
Protoplanets and Protoplanetary Disks
Cody Hall, AB 107
Josh Eisner (University of Arizona)
September 26, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Based on the existence of our solar system, and thousands of known exoplanets, we know that planets form. While theories have been developed to explain the demographics of these known planets, we have few direct constraints on the physical processes involved in planet formation. I…
Galaxy Cluster Evolution over the Past 10 Billion Years
Cody Hall, AB 107
Michael A. McDonald (MIT Kavli Institute)
September 19, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
In recent years, the number of known galaxy clusters at has grown dramatically thanks in large part to the success of surveys utilizing the Sunyaev Zel’dovich effect. In particular, surveys such as the South Pole Telescope 2500 deg^2 survey have discovered hundreds of new distant…
Dynamical modeling of MaNGA galaxies
Cody Hall, AB 107
Shude Mao (Tsinghua University)
August 08, 2018
15:00 - 16:00
The SDSS-IV MaNGA survey will eventually obtain integrated field unit data for ten thousand galaxies in the nearby universe; currently more than half of the data have already been collected. I will discuss how dynamical modeling of these galaxies can be used to study their…
Native Skywatchers – A Leading Model for Indigenous STEM – and Examples of More Inclusive Science
Cody Hall, AB 107
Annette Lee (St. Cloud State University)
April 25, 2018
14:00 - 15:00
Annette S. Lee is an astrophysicist, artist and the Director of the Native Skywatchers (NSW) research and programming initiative with three decades of experience in education as a teacher, university instructor, teacher educator, program administrator, professional visual artist, and researcher. The overarching goal of NSW…
Why We Need to Understand Stars to Find the Next Earth
Cody Hall, AB 107
Rachel Osten (Space Telescope Science Institute)
April 04, 2018
14:00 - 15:00
With the discovery of the first planet orbiting a normal star more than twenty years ago, and thousands of detected exoplanets since then, astronomy is firmly in the age of the exoplanet. The ultimate goal is to answer the question “Are we alone?”, with evidence…
Illuminating Gravitational Waves
Cody Hall, AB 107
Mansi Kasliwal (Caltech)
March 28, 2018
14:00 - 15:00
On August 17 2017, for the first time, an electromagnetic counterpart to gravitational waves was detected. Two neutron stars merged and lit up the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma-rays to the radio. The infrared signature vividly demonstrates that neutron star mergers are indeed the long-sought…