Past Colloquia
Searching for Ghosts at SNOLAB
Cody Hall
Mark Chen (Queens)
November 01, 2013
14:00 - 15:00
SNOLAB is Canada’s world-leading underground laboratory for particle astrophysics experiments. What are we trying to do there? Detect the invisible: searching for particles of dark matter, measuring the flux of ghostly neutrinos from the Sun and the Earth, trying to observe a most peculiar nuclear…
Massive Stars Across the Cosmos: Engines, Lighthouses, and Laboratories
Cody Hall
Emily Levesque (Colorado)
October 25, 2013
14:00 - 15:00
Massive stars can provide valuable information on a Galactic, extragalactic, and even cosmological scale. The radiative signatures observed in HII regions and star-forming galaxies are determined by massive stellar populations. Long-duration gamma-ray bursts, produced during the core-collapse deaths of unusual massive stars, can be utilized as powerful probes of the…
Galaxy mergers in the nearby universe
Cody Hall
Sara Ellison (University of Victoria)
October 21, 2013
14:00 - 15:00
Galaxy mergers are known to trigger dramatic changes in galactic morphology, metallicity, star formation and black hole accretion rates. However, the extent to which these properties respond to the interaction can vary greatly both between different mergers, and at different times during a given interaction. …
Astrophysics with Submillimeter Galactic Plane Surveys
Cody Hall
Yancy Shirley (Arizona)
October 11, 2013
14:00 - 15:00
The advent of large format bolometers arrays have made it possible to survey the Galaxy and search for embedded sites of star formation in a much less biased way than previous studies. The Bolocam Galactic Survey (BGPS) is a continuum survey 1.1 mm at 30″…
The formation of supermassive black holes in the universe
Cody Hall
Priya Natarajan (Yale)
October 04, 2013
14:00 - 15:00
Populations of quasars powered by accretion onto SMBHs with masses in excess of 10^9 solar masses are now detected when the Universe was barely a Gyr old. And in the local universe the centers of several nearby brightest cluster galaxies harbor behemoths that weigh ~ a…
Ocean Worlds of the Outer Solar System
Cody Hall
Kevin Hand (NASA JPL)
September 27, 2013
14:00 - 15:00
At least five moons in the outer solar system may harbor liquid water oceans. These oceans have likely persisted for much of the history of the solar system and as a result they are highly compelling targets in our search for life beyond Earth. Dr….
Directly Imaging and Characterizing Extrasolar Planets
Cody Hall
Thayne Currie (Toronto)
September 20, 2013
14:00 - 15:00
Direct imaging is the new frontier in exoplanet detection and the means by which we will eventually discover a true Earth twin around a Sun-like star. In this talk, I introduce the new observing techniques/powerful image processing methods used to directly image planets. I will…
New Opportunities with the Gemini Observatory
Cody Hall
Markus Kissler-Patig (Gemini)
September 18, 2013
15:00 - 16:00
Gemini Observatory’s director Markus Kissler-Patig will present an update of the facility and introduce some new opportunities for astronomers at Gemini. Gemini operates twin 8-m telescopes, one in Hawaii and the other in Chile. The departure of the UK from Gemini’s international partnership at the…
The Environmental Impact on Powerful Radio Galaxies
Cody Hall
Julie Banfield (CSIRO,Australia)
September 13, 2013
14:00 - 15:00
There are many various types of morphological properties of radio galaxies and it remains unclear as to what causes these differences. Do the intrinsic properties of the central engine (‘nature’) mold and shape the radio source? Do the properties of the surrounding medium of the…
Observing Luminous Infrared Galaxies at Low and High Redshift
Cody Hall
Lee Armus (IPAC/Caltech)
April 19, 2013
14:00 - 15:00
The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) provided the first unbiased survey of the sky at mid and far-infrared wavelengths, giving us a comprehensive census of the infrared emission properties of galaxies in the local Universe. Luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs), which emit a significant fraction of their…