Event Type: MATs

Talk: Sunil Simha, 3:00pm – 3:30pm  

Talk 1: Jamie Lin, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Talk 2: Dave Clements, 3:30pm – 4:00pm The deepest Herschel-SPIRE Field The Herschel Dark Field was observed regularly by the SPIRE instrument for calibration purposes. We have now combined all this calibration data, amounting to a total of 141 observations, to produce the deepest far-IR image ever achieved. Our

Talk 1: Salyang Zhang, 3:00pm – 3:30pm   Talk 2: Lizhong Zhang, 3:30pm – 4:00pm Modeling black hole accretion with radiation GRMHD: a parameter survey and connection to observations Radiation and magnetic fields play crucial roles in shaping black hole accretion across a wide range of regimes. To model these systems, we solve the GRMHD equations coupled

Talk: Christopher Lindsay, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Stellar astrophysics and galactic archaeology with asteroseismology The analysis of stellar oscillations, known as asteroseismology, has enabled detailed studies of the interior structures of stars, particularly subgiants and red giants. Since many areas of astrophysics rely on stellar modeling, asteroseismology provides a vital tool for improving our understanding of how

Talk : Marie Lau, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Probing Quasar/galaxy evolution, feeding, and feedback: Extremely Red Quasars (ERQs) and the Quasar-Associated Inflows Legacy Survey (QUAILS) My research focuses on understanding the evolution, feeding, and feedback processes in quasar-host galaxies, particularly through extremely red quasars (ERQs) and quasar-associated absorption lines. First, I study ERQs at cosmic-noon redshifts. Using

Talk : Jesse Han, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Hypervelocity Stars Trace a Supermassive Black Hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) are produced by the Hills mechanism when a stellar binary is disrupted by a supermassive black hole (SMBH). The HVS Survey detected 21 unbound B-type main-sequence stars in the Milky Way’s outer halo that

Talk 1: Tiger Hsiao, 3:00pm – 3:30pm First star clusters observed in the early universe with JWST and gravitational lensing Understanding when, how, and why the first generation of stars and galaxies formed is crucial for revealing the early chapters of cosmic history. To reveal the first chapter of cosmic history and understand our cosmic

Talk 1: Grant Donnelly, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Touched by fire: insights from PAHs in active galaxies The space between the stars in galaxies is sprinkled with particles of condensed matter collectively referred to as “dust”. Absorbing large amounts of starlight and consequently glowing in the infrared, dust is a critical component of interstellar radiative transfer,

Talk 1: Ben Lakeland, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Using the sun to find earth twins Radial-velocity (RV) spectroscopy is a vital tool in exoplanet science, both as an independent detection method and as follow-up characterization for transiting exoplanets. State-of-the-art RV spectrographs have the instrumental sensitivity to detect sub-meter-per-second variations necessary to detect small exoplanets. Despite this,

Talk: Charlie Mpetha, 3:00pm – 3:30pm The infall region of galaxy clusters as a complementary probe to cluster abundance Galaxy cluster abundance measurements provide a classic test of cosmology. However, they exhibit a strong degeneracy between the amplitude of density fluctuations σ8, and the matter density Ωm, as do other similar low-redshift tests such as

Talk: Minori Shikauchi, 3:00pm – 3:30pm A blind search for gamma-ray burst afterglows with CHIME Short gamma-ray bursts (sGRBs) are energetic and explosive events in the Universe.  The coincident detection of GRB 170817A and a gravitational wave (GW) from a binary neutron star (BNS) merger raises questions about the conditions in which BNS mergers cause

Talk 1: Shreya Anand, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Testing whether Collapsars Synthesize r-process elements A rare sub-class of stripped envelope massive-star explosions, dubbed broad-lined Ic supernovae (SNe Ic-BL) have been highlighted as one of the potential sites of r-process nucleosynthesis capable of enriching our solar neighborhood with heavy elements. Here we present the first systematic study

Talk 1: Tom Rose, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Observing AGN fueling via molecular absorption lines Molecular gas plays a significant role in powering AGN. Unfortunately, observing this gas on small spatial scales is difficult because it can normally only be seen en masse through emission lines. I will present observations of molecular gas in several massive

Talk 1: Haowen Zhang, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Trinity: self-consistent dark matter halo-galaxy-supermassive black hole connection from z=0-10, and predictions on high-z quasars in the JWST era We present TRINITY, a flexible empirical model that self-consistently infers the statistical connection between dark matter haloes, galaxies, and supermassive black holes (SMBHs). TRINITY is constrained by galaxy observables

Talk 1: Lalitha Sairam, 3:00pm – 3:30pm When stars misbehave: the impact of stellar activity on exoplanet research and the need for a public forecast The study of exoplanets has unveiled a diverse array of worlds beyond our solar system. However, the detection and characterization of exoplanets remain challenging due to the magnetic activity of

Talk 1: Xiurui Zhao, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Active galactic nuclei in the NuSTAR era Active galactic nuclei (AGN), which represent the rapidly growing phase of the supermassive black holes (SMBH), radiate across the whole electromagnetic spectrum from radio to Gamma-rays. X-rays, which are seen in most AGN, are an important tool to study the physics

Talk 1: Evan Bauer, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Modeling runaway donor stars to understand supernovae in white dwarf binaries In the quest to understand the physics and astrophysics of how Type Ia supernovae occur, we have recently turned attention toward better understanding the physics of mass transfer and detonation in double white dwarf binary systems. These

Talk: Jean Somalwar, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Tidal disruption events in the VLA Sky Survey The ubiquity of supermassive black holes in galactic centers leads to a cornucopia of dramatic phenomena. One of the most spectacular of these occurs when a star ventures near the SMBH and is shredded in a tidal disruption event (TDE). TDEs produce bright,

Talk 1: Cheng-Lin Liao, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Extending to the brightest end: physical properties of the 870um brightest dusty star-forming galaxies at z~3 Dusty star-forming galaxies (DSFGs), luminous in the infrared, are dust-rich galaxies with intense star formation (SFR~10-1000 Msun/yr) predominantly at cosmic noon (z~1-3). They are crucial for understanding galaxy formation and evolution, as

Talk 1: Will Roper, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Massive compact galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization – this can’t be right…a tale of confusion, surprise, and compact galaxies Massive galaxies in the early universe are thought to be highly compact, an assertion which the first Webb observations have only strengthened. Indeed, in the First Light And

Talk 1: Molly Wolfson, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Constraining reionization with the Lyman-a forest flux auto-correlation function Reionization is a major phase change in our universe’s history and understanding this transition remains a major open problem. One measurable signature of reionization is the mean free path of ionizing photons (λmfp) which rapidly evolves at the end

Talk: Manas Vishal, 3:00pm – 3:30pm A discontinuous Galerkin method for the distributionally-sourced s=0 Teukolsky equation With the detection of first gravitational waves in 2015 by the laser interferometers at Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatories (LIGO) located in Hanford and Livingston that was followed by a Nobel prize, there is an urgent need of more

Talk 1: Jack Neustadt, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Looking beyond the lamppost: a new method of understanding AGN continuum variability The variability of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) has been studied for decades, with the UV/optical continuum observed to stochastically fluctuate at the 10% level over timescales of weeks to months. Fundamentally, this variability should be driven

Talk 1: Adriana Dropulic, 3:00pm – 3:30pm StreamGen: morphologies and orbits of semi-analytic satellite galaxies Stellar streams are excellent probes of dark matter halos and their structure. Interestingly, the Milky Way’s stellar streams are significantly more clustered in the inner regions of the Galaxy compared to those in simulations. These simulations are expensive and can

Talk: Zhihui Li, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Unveiling the multiphase, clumpy structure of the Circumgalactic Medium of High-z galaxies In this talk, I will present our recent progress on constraining the physical properties of the ”cool” (T ~ 104K) phase of the circumgalactic medium (CGM) via modeling Lya emission and low-ionization-state (LIS) metal absorption lines. We developed

Talk 1: Jesse Han, 3:00pm – 3:30pm A galactic mystery ‘unwarped’ The outer disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is warped and flared. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain these phenomena, but none have quantitatively reproduced both features. Recent work has demonstrated that the Galactic stellar halo is tilted with respect to the disk

Talk 1: David Robinson, 3:00pm –  3:30pm Cooling and heating functions with Machine Learning In the era of JWST, observations are yielding more detailed information about the distribution and structure of star-formation regions in distant galaxies than ever before. To interpret these observations, galaxy simulations need to use increasingly sophisticated sub-grid models of star formation

Talk: Letizia Buglani, 3:00pm –  3:30pm Star-formation quenching in massive galaxies at Cosmic Noon: new perspectives from JWST The study of massive, quiescent galaxies at high redshift is crucial for understanding many physical processes driving galaxy evolution. Recent observations by JWST of such galaxies already in place at z ∼ 4 has opened up questions

Talk 1: Sean Terry, 2:30pm – 3:00pm A precursor survey of the Roman Galactic Bulge Time Domain fields I will present a recently approved program to conduct a large coordinated-parallel Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging survey of the upcoming Roman Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey (RGBTDS) fields. Precursor imaging of this area with HST several years

Talk 1: Yilja Li, 3:00pm –  3:30pm A new photoionization emulator to flexibly model the ionizing sources and nebular conditions What reionized the universe? What are the masses, star formation rates, and formation histories of galaxies in the z>5 universe? Answering these questions requires a detailed understanding of the nebular emission properties in galaxies. However,

Talk 1: Judah van Zandt, 3:00pm –  3:30pm The prevalence of distant giant companions to inner small planets NASA’s Kepler mission taught us that small close-in planets occur at a rate of ~1 per Sun-like star. Meanwhile, ground-based RV surveys have shown that long-period gas giants are rarer, with an occurrence rate of ~0.15 per

Talk 1: Jose Benavides, 3:00pm –  3:30pm Morphological transition in simulated low-mass galaxies in FIREbox Disk formation in galaxies is a central topic in understanding galactic evolution and the small-scale structure of the Universe. Low-mass galaxies (M* < 10^10 Msun) exhibit significant morphological diversity, with many showing dynamics dominated by velocity dispersions rather than rotational

Talk 1: Caleb Kenji Harada, 3:00pm –  3:30pm Precursor science for the Habitable Worlds Observatory: Pathways to planet properties Searching for life on planets in the habitable zones (HZs) of nearby stars is a primary science objective of future space-based observatories with starlight suppression technology, e.g., the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). In just two decades,

Talk: Laya Ghodsi, 3:00pm –  3:30pm Multiphase circumgalactic medium of MACS1931-26 brightest cluster galaxy The evolution of galaxies is influenced by the diffuse gas reservoir surrounding them, known as the circumgalactic medium (CGM). The CGM acts as a bridge between galaxies and their cosmological environment, enabling gas flows that fuel star formation and redistribute metals

Talk 1: Rodrigo Cordova Rosado, 3:00pm –  3:30pm Black hole growth and connections to dark matter halos: new insights from wide-field cosmological surveys Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are the signposts of black hole growth, and likely play an important role in galaxy evolution. An outstanding question is whether AGN of different spectral type indicate different

Talk 1: Hannah Fronenberg, 3:00pm –  3:30pm Can cross-correlations deliver measurements of the Epoch of Reionization? 21cm observations have the potential to directly probe the epoch of reionization, but significant observational challenges remain. Foreground contamination and instrument systematics can in principle be mitigated through cross-correlations with other probes such as line intensity maps (LIM), but

Talk 1: Viraj Karambelkar, 3:00pm –  3:30pm Anthropology of merging stars: Tracing the evolution and impact of stellar mergers with time-domain surveys Most massive stars reside in binary systems where mutual interactions can draw them close enough to merge. These mergers offer insights into key processes like common-envelope evolution, a critical yet poorly understood phase

Talk 1: Gilad Sadeh, 3:00pm – 3:30pm Non-thermal emission following Compact Objects Mergers Mergers of compact objects are expected to produce a highly relativistic collimated ejecta along with a quasi-spherical mildly relativistic ejecta. We model the non-thermal emission produced by the relativistic ejecta. Guided by 1D and 2D numerical calculations (that we carried out using

Qiong Li: 3:00pm –  3:30pm Environmental effects on galaxy formation and protocluster galaxy candidates at 4.5<z<10 The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has produced a revolution in using photometric redshifts and/or multi-color selection criteria to find galaxies at the extreme redshifts, offering a unique opportunity to answer questions regarding the formation of galaxies in the

3:00pm –  3:30pm, Akshara Viswanathan Tracing the Milky Way’s ancient footsteps: Insights from chemodynamical investigations of bright and distant metal-poor stars Galaxy formation and evolution is a complex process. The chemodynamical study of metal-poor stars in the Milky Way provides a unique and powerful way of unlocking the secrets of star formation, and the growth

3:00pm –  3:30pm, Rachel Bowens-Rubin The observer that cried Wolf 359: hunting for exoplanets in the fifth-closest system using direct imaging and radial velocity Wolf 359 is a low-mass star in the fifth-closest neighboring system. Because of its relative youth and proximity, Wolf 359 offers a unique opportunity to study substellar companions around M stars