MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

Institute Holiday- No Monday Afternoon Science Talks

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

MKI staff and students are invited to our weekly Science Talks, featuring presentations from two visiting researchers. When available, titles and abstracts for the talks will be published here.

Dylan Jow- Stanford University Title: Coherent map making of the nanohertz gravitational wave sky with pulsar timing arrays Abstract: Recent evidence for a gravitational wave background from pulsar timing arrays has energized the field of nanohertz gravitational wave astronomy. However, many of the science cases for nanohertz GW astronomy require going beyond a simple detection

Julia Sisk Reynes- Harvard CfA Mor Rozner- Institute for Advanced Study Titles and abstracts coming soon.

Callum Fairbairn- Institute for Advanced Study Title: Eccentric perturber-disk interactions: linear theory and numerical verification Abstract: The interaction between a gravitationally perturbing body and the surrounding gas is a fundamental astrophysical problem. In a homogeneous gaseous environment, the resulting wake response leads to the classical gas dynamical friction results. However, in rotationally supported systems dominated

Isaac Malsky (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) Aditya Tamar (Max Planck Institute) Silvia Onorato (Gemini Observatory) Talk titles, abstracts, and biographies coming soon.  

Sam Cutler (Tufts University) Title: The Structure and Formation Histories of Low-Mass Quiescent Galaxies in Overdense Environments Abstract: Low-mass quiescent galaxies are thought to predominantly reside in overdense regions, as environmental effects are often invoked to explain their shutdown of star formation. These longer-timescale quenching mechanisms leave imprints on galaxy morphologies, emphasizing the importance of

Note: Due to severe weather, this event will be held exclusively via Zoom Tirso Marin Gilabert (Harvard CfA) Viscous or Turbulent? Interpreting XRISM’s Coma Puzzle with High-Resolution Simulations The evolution of galaxy clusters is strongly shaped by the physics of the intracluster medium (ICM), where processes such as turbulence, mixing, and alaxy–ICM interactions drive much

Ivelin Georgiev (Stockholm University and Open University at Israel) Title and abstract coming soon. Biography: Ivelin’s research explores how the 21-cm signal can reveal the properties of the first light sources and how combining it with other observations of the intergalactic medium can deepen our understanding of the astrophysics of the first stars and galaxies

Institute Holiday- No Monday Afternoon Science Talks

Barry Chiang (Yale University) Dynamics of Dark Matter Subhalos: Velocity Anisotropy, Numerical Convergence, and Cluster Lenses In the hierarchical structure formation model of ΛCDM cosmology, dark matter halos grow by accreting lower-mass subhalos and exhibit non-trivial velocity anisotropy due to aspherical collapse and radial mass infall. Once accreted, the tidal evolution of these subhalos is

Vasily Kokorev (University of Texas at Austin) Ghost in the Cocoon: Unmasking the Dense Gas Shell Around a Little Red Dot Little Red Dots have quickly become one of the most debated discoveries of the JWST era, showing unexpectedly strong breaks and absorption features that hint at buried AGN growing inside extremely dense gas. In

Mitigating Radio Frequency Interference in Radio Astronomy: Recent Progress at Brown Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a pressing challenge for radio astronomy, particularly for experiments targeting the Cosmic Dark Ages and the Epoch of Reionization. As the number of artificial radio emitters continues to grow, RFI has become increasingly difficult to avoid. Significant research effort

Rebecca Surman, University of Notre Dame Victoria DiTomasso, Harvard CfA

Yixian Chen, UC Santa Cruz Unorthodox planet-disk interaction: Eccentricity, Turbulence and Winds The classical circumplanetary disk (CPD) pattern is prograde – in other words, aligned with the Protoplanetary disk. Using 3D global hydrodynamic simulations, we show that when planet eccentricity is large enough, the CPD can become retrograde due to impact velocity relative to the

Richard Pan, Tufts University Pipit Triani, Harvard CfA  

Wata Chanita Tubthong (Tufts University) Small circumbinary planets are truly rarer than small single-star planets All circumbinary planets (CBPs) confirmed up-to-date are gas giants. No circumbinary super Earth has been discovered, despite the super Earths making up ~80% of the planet population around single stars. This is owing to the inherently biased nature of the

Sabrina Berger (The University of Melbourne) Title: Simulations Meet JWST to Understand AGN at Cosmic Dawn Abstract: The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is transforming our understanding of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the early Universe. For the first time, astronomers have detected and characterized galaxies hosting luminous quasars at z > 6. JWST has

Scott Lucchini, Harvard CfA Title: The Circumgalactic Medium at 200 pc Abstract: The circumgalactic medium (CGM) plays a crucial role in the baryon cycle by mediating all of the gas flows in and out of the galaxy. However, simulating this region is difficult due to its immense volume and low densities. Fixed spatial resolution is

Myles Sherman (Caltech) Searching for Long-Period Radio Transients with the DSA-110 In this talk, I will describe the design and commissioning tests for the DSA-110 Not-So-Fast Radio Burst (NSFRB) search pipeline, a 1.4 GHz image-plane single-pulse search sensitive to 134 ms-160.8 s radio bursts. Extending the pulse width range of the DSA-110 Fast Radio Burst

Alexa Gordon (Northwestern University) Revealing the Progenitor(s) of Fast Radio Bursts through their Environments Abstract: Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are a new class of highly energetic, extragalactic transients. Despite thousands of FRBs detected to date, many fundamental questions remain, including their progenitor(s) and emission mechanism(s). The ability to localize FRBs to sub-arcsecond precision–pinpointing them to

Peter Scherbak (Caltech) Title: Rapid Binary Mass Transfer: Circumbinary Outflows and Angular Momentum Losses across Mass Transfer Rates Abstract: High rates of stable mass transfer (MT) occur in some binary star systems, producing luminous transients and driving circumbinary outflows. We perform hydrodynamical simulations of a donor star transferring mass to a point-mass accretor across a range of

Philippe Yao: Theoretical Models for Repeating Nuclear Transients: Stellar Orbits, Disk Encounters & Mass Transfer Barry Ginat: The Small-Scale Limit of the Cold-Dark-Matter Power-Spectrum

Ajay Gill (MIT AeroAstro) Title: A study of galaxy clusters and filaments with the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect using multifrequency cosmic microwave background observations Abstract: Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe. Their study probes the evolution of large-scale structure in the universe. I will discuss a new methodology to study the thermal

Karthik Yadavalli (Harvard/CfA) Title: Radiative Transfer Modeling Supernovae to Understand Progenitor Physics Abstract: The specifics of the final-stage evolution and death of a massive star are not perfectly known. In particular, how the population of stars that lead to type Ib and Ic SNe (SNe Ib/c) experience core-collapse and ultimately explode as supernovae is so

Junehyong Jeon: Formation and Evolution of Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe Vedant Chandra: Tales from the Milky Way’s Distant Horizon

Chun Huang (Washington University in St. Louis) Linking Multiwavelength Pulsar Emission to Super-Dense Physics inside neutron star The utilization of Pulse Profile modeling techniques could simultaneously provide measurements for Neutron star Mass Radius and offer insights into their hotspot distribution. Presently, these methodologies rely on meta models of the equation of state (EOS) and employ

Talk 1: Yilun Ma, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Searching for little red dots across redshifts Little red dots (LRD) are a population of red, compact, broad-line objects discovered by JWST at 5<z<8. They show a characteristic V-shaped SED, where a blue UV continuum is followed by a steep red rise in optical, and they are otherwise not

Talk: Sunil Simha, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Cosmic accountancy: Baryon budgeting using FRB dispersion measures Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are being detected and precisely localized (~<1’’) at an accelerating pace due to the efforts of several FRB experiments worldwide. Chief among these is the CHIME telescope and its outriggers, which are well on their way to localizing

Talk: Dave Clements, 3:00pm – 3:30pm The deepest Herschel-SPIRE Field We present the first results from the deepest far-IR observations ever made. These come from the Herschel-SPIRE dark field, a region observed multiple times over the entire course of the Herschel mission for calibration and instrument health purposes. Our final images combine 141 separate observations