Past Colloquia
Observing the hierarchical formation of our Milky Way
AB 107, Codyhall
Alan McConnachie, NRC Herzberg
October 26, 2022
3:00pm - 4:00pm
2024 will be the 30th anniversary of the discovery of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, the prototype and nonpareil of a galaxy in the process of being consumed by our Milky Way. It remains the most striking evidence for the ongoing hierarchical formation of galaxies in our…
Black holes and revelations: unseen companions in stellar binaries
AB 107, Codyhall
Kareem El-Badry
October 19, 2022
3:00pm - 4:00pm
The Milky Way contains of order 10^8 stellar-mass black holes (BHs). Yet, fewer than 100 BH candidates are known, and only about 20 are dynamically confirmed. Our view of the BH population has been shaped almost entirely by observations of X-ray binaries and gravitational wave…
The Irregular Moon Systems of the Giant Planets
AB 107, Codyhall, 50 St. George Street Toronto
Brett Gladman
September 28, 2022
3:00pm - 4:00pm
Each of our giant planets has a regular and an irregular systemof moons. Regular moons lie very close to the planet’s equatorialplane on nearly-circular direct orbits that share the planetaryrotational sense, and likely formed in the disk. Irregular moons,in contrast, orbit at nearly all orbital…
Colloquium with Carol-Ann Burke
Zoom
Carol-Ann Burke, OISE, University of Toronto
April 06, 2022
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
More information coming soon
Colloquium with Shude Mao
March 23, 2022
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
More information coming soon.
Dynamical probes of black holes in globular clusters
TBD
Vincent Hénault-Brunet, Saint Mary's University
March 09, 2022
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Abstract: Globular star clusters (GCs) have long been used to test theories of stellar evolution, stellar dynamics, and galaxy formation. In recent years, these old and compact stellar systems have emerged as fertile grounds to search for black holes and understand their formation, as well…
Resolving to Resolve (or Re-solve?) Issues in Galaxy Formation with Resolved Data Abstract:
Cody Hall,
Adam Muzzin, York University
March 02, 2022
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Over the last decade we have made staggering progress measuring the mass growth and star formation rates of the galaxy population out to z ~ 10. Although we now know when galaxies form their stars and grow their black holes, the how, where and why…
What have we learned from gravitational wave detections?
Zoom
Jess McIver, University of British Columbia
February 23, 2022
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
In less than five years, the field of gravitational wave astronomy has grown from a groundbreaking first discovery to revealing new populations of stellar remnants through distant cosmic collisions. I’ll summarize recent results from LIGO-Virgo and their wide-reaching implications, give an overview of the instrumentation…
A Golden Age of Asteroseismology with Kepler and TESS
Zoom
Prof. Tim Bedding, University of Sydney
February 16, 2022
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Asteroseismology uses the natural oscillation modes of stars to study their interiors. The wonderfully precise measurements by NASA’s Kepler and TESS missions are ideal data sources for the technique. These space telescopes have been monitoring the brightness of hundreds of thousands of stars, with the…
Cosmic dawn through the eye of space telescopes
Zoom
Michele Trenti, University of Melbourne
February 09, 2022
4:00pm - 5:00pm
During the last decade, the synergy between space-based infrared observations and theoretical/numerical modeling transformed our view of galaxy formation at cosmic dawn, and progress is expected to accelerate with next generation facilities. I will review the status of the field, in particular recent Hubble WFC3…