Past Colloquia
Advancing the Astronomical Inclusion Revolution
Zoom
Dara Norman, NOIRLab
March 31, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
The field of Astronomy and Astrophysics has seen major changes in the last couple of decades. There have been discoveries that have evolved our understanding of the Universe. The development of new methods and gathering of datasets have expanded topical areas of the field in…
Shaping the future of weak-lensing cosmology with the Roman Space Telescope
Zoom
Dr. Jenna Freudenburg, DADDAA
March 24, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
In the past decade, our understanding of the standard model of cosmology has been shaped by constraints on Lambda-CDM from so-called Stage III surveys, such as the Dark Energy Survey. In the 2020s, a wealth of new data from Stage IV surveys – including the…
The End of all Worlds
Zoom
Boris Gaensicke, University of Warwick
March 17, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Many of the known planets – in the solar system Mars and beyond – will survive the post main-sequence evolution of their host stars into white dwarfs. Later interactions scatter asteroids, moons, and possibly entire planets deep into the gravitational potential of the white dwarf,…
A New Era of Interferometry with GRAVITY
Zoom
Frank Eisenhauer, Max Planck Institute
March 10, 2021
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
The GRAVITY instrument has enabled major steps forward in infrared interferometry, by phase-referenced imaging at milli-arcsecond resolution, with a sensitivity increase by factor thousands, 30-100 micro-arcsecond astrometry, and few micro-arcsecond differential spectro-astrometry. We give an overview of the technology behind GRAVITY and highlight the game-changing…
Cosmology with Gravitational Lens Time Delays
Zoom
Sherry Suyu, Max Planck Institute
March 03, 2021
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Strong gravitational lenses with measured time delays between the multiple images can be used to determine the Hubble constant (H0) that sets the expansion rate of the Universe. An independent determination of H0 is important to ascertain the possible need of new physics beyond the…
Colloquia with Dr. Daniel Gilman and Dr. Almog Yalinewich
Zoom
Daniel Gilman, DADDAA; Almog Yalinewich, CITA
February 24, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Investigating the nature of dark matter with strong gravitational lensing by Daniel Gilman Strong gravitational lensing by galaxies provides a powerful, direct, and elegant method to infer the properties of dark matter structure below 10^8 solar masses, where halos are almost completely devoid of stars and…
Interpreting the ALMA continuum images of protoplanetary disks
Zoom
Kees Dullemond, University of Heidelberg
February 17, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
In recent years a large number of high-resolution ALMA images of protoplanetary disks were published. It is striking how cleanly structured these disks appear to be: they feature nearly perfect rings of dust, with every now and then an elliptic blob, and sometimes m=2 “grand…
Colloquia with Lamiya Mowla and Keir Rogers
Zoom
Local Postdoctoral Fellows, University of Toronto
February 10, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Making it Big: The Effect of Dust on Galaxy Morphology – by Lamiya Mowla Galaxy morphology is one of the fundamental and oldest observational tools used to study the formation and evolution of galaxies. Decades of observations from the ground and thousands of orbits of…
Exoplanet Host Star Age Inferences and Their Impacts on Models of Planet Formation and Evolution
Zoom
Kevin Schlaufman, Johns Hopkins
February 03, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Precise ages for exoplanet host stars have among their many uses the potential to reveal the origin and fate of short-period planets, the effect of host star mass on giant planet formation, the structure and role of atmospheric escape in the evolution of low-mass planets,…
Pinpointing fast radio bursts in space and time
Zoom
Jason Hessels, University of Amsterdam
January 27, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
In the past decade we have started to explore extragalactic and intergalactic space using millisecond-duration radio flashes called `fast radio bursts’ (FRBs). These cosmological signals are surprisingly abundant: there is likely an FRB occurring somewhere on the sky at least once every minute. But what…