"Dynamical Instabilities in the Aid of Planet Formation in Circumstellar Disks"

Abstract: During the first million years of evolution, nascent planetary systems are embedded in dense disk-shaped clouds of gas. These circumstellar disks are home to a myriad of hydrodynamical processes, which bring about turbulence and the emergence of viscous-like behavior, enabling accretion of gas onto the protostar. Meanwhile, micron-sized dust grains embedded in the disk are growing through coagulation onto pebbles and rocks. Turbulence has a positive effect on these small solids,...

Read more about ITC Colloquium - Wladimir Lyra (NMSU)

"Some recent results in gravitational-wave science"

The era of gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology has begun. We'll discuss some recent results, focusing on constraints that come from the population of gravitational-wave events. Topics will include the lower (between neutron stars and black holes) and the upper (due to pair-instability supernovae) mass gaps, standard siren cosmology, and recent events including GW190814 (with a secondary object that might be a neutron star or a black hole; we're not sure which) and GW190521 (with two black holes potentially in...

Read more about ITC Colloquium - Daniel Holz (Chicago)

"New test of the black hole metric with EHT images of Sgr A*"

Our understanding of astrophysical black holes is predicated on the assumption that they are well described by the  Kerr solution to Einstein’s equations. A promising avenue for testing the Kerr hypothesis is to detect the shadow a black hole casts on the surrounding emission and compare its size and shape to the predictions of the Kerr metric. New horizon-scale images of the Galactic Center black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) recently published by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) allow for new strong-field tests... Read more about ITC Colloquium - Lia Medeiros (IAS)

Yueying Ni (ITC)

"The ASTRID simulation: the evolution of massive black holes"

The launch of the next-generation telescopes will soon revolutionize the study of the high-redshift universe and allow us to better understand the evolution of the first galaxies and supermassive black holes. Making full use of future observations will require a new generation of cosmological simulations with large volumes for statistical samples of large structures and with high resolution to model the galaxy formation. In this talk, I will introduce the ASTRID simulation, one of the...

Read more about ITC Colloquium - Yueying Ni, Jake Bennett, and Carol Cuesta-Lazaro