Past Colloquia
The Long and Winding Road: My path as an educator
Zoom
Prof. Greg Evans, P.Eng, FCEA, FAAAS, FCAAE, University of Toronto
November 24, 2021
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Learning to teach is often a private process, that we pursue on a public stage. In contrast with the way we discover new knowledge in our laboratories or instruct fundamentals in our classrooms, teaching is most often learnt experientially with little to no scaffolding to…
Insights into relativistic gravity and stellar evolution from pulsar timing
Zoom
Professor Matthew Bailes, Swinburne University of Technology/OzGrav
November 17, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Binary pulsars have given us remarkable insights into many aspects of gravity and stellar evolution. In this talk I will show how both long and patient timing campaigns and new instruments such as the South African MeerKAT telescope are providing new insights into the interstellar…
Towards a better understanding of low-mass galaxies beyond the Local Group
Zoom
Shany Danieli, Princeton University
November 10, 2021
11:00am - 12:00 pm
Recent advances in telescope instrumentation and image analysis techniques have opened up a new window into the low surface brightness Universe. In particular, they now enable comprehensive and systematic investigations of low-mass galaxies beyond the Local Group. Their number densities, structures, and internal dynamics can…
Resurrecting life’s past in search of life in the universe
Zoom
Betül Kaçar, Prof., UW-Madison Bacteriology; Director, NASA Astrobiology Center MUSE
November 03, 2021
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Studying ancient Earth is not new in astrobiology, but elucidating general principles – selection rules – has not been a focus. This needs to change in the coming decade as astronomers and astrobiologists are broadening their search strategy beyond an exclusive framework of “life as…
Tracing the build-up of massive galaxies from their smallest components: The view from the Virgo cluster
Zoom
Eric Peng, Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics
October 27, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
The build-up of galaxies is thought to be a continual process of merging and accretion of smaller components. This history is difficult to disentangle, but studying low-mass stellar systems such as dwarf galaxies and star clusters gives us a window onto the entire history of galaxy…
Colloquium with Kathryn Neugent and Ziggy Pleunis
Zoom
Dr. Kathryn Neugent and Dr. Ziggy Pleunis
October 20, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
The Binary Fraction of Red Supergiants … and Beyond! — by Kathryn Neugent The binary fraction of massive main-sequence OB stars is thought to be as high as 70% or greater. However, until recently, only around a dozen binary red supergiants (RSGs) had been identified,…
Probing the early Milky Way with the Pristine survey
Zoom
Else Starkenburg
October 13, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
The lowest metallicity stars that still exist today represent a window into the early Universe. Studying these stars gives us a local avenue to guide our understanding of star formation and supernova feedback in the early Universe, the early build-up of galaxies like our Milky…
Dwarf Galaxies and Their Black Holes
Zoom
Jenny Greene, Princeton
October 06, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Because they are dark-matter dominated, dwarf galaxies provide some of the most stringent tests of our cold dark matter model. Specifically, Lambda CDM makes predictions about the number, shape, and spatial distributions of the faint friends of massive galaxies. I will present results from the…
Colloquium with Prof. Adam Hincks and Prof. Marten van Kerkwijk
Zoom
Adam Hincks and Marten van Kerkwijk, University of Toronto
September 29, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
A Cosmic Filament Illuminated by the Cosmic Microwave Background – by Prof. Adam Hincks Only a small fraction of baryons today are found in galaxies. In fact, for many years ~30–40% of the baryonic matter predicted to exist by early universe cosmology were unaccounted for…
Colloquium with Renée Hložek and Ting Li
Zoom
Renée Hložek and Ting Li, University of Toronto
September 22, 2021
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Can astronomical methods help detect signs of neurodegeneration? – by Prof. Renée Hložek Structures in the brain look like structures in the sky: the natural world contains self-similarity that can be exploited to allow for learning across disciplines. While imaging data in the two fields…