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Past Events

  • 2020 Feb 20

    ITC Colloquium - Christoph Weniger (GRAPPA, U of Amsterdam)

    11:00am to 12:00pm

    Location: 

    Pratt

    "Uncovering Dark Matter with Compact Objects and Automatic Differentiation"

    The nature of dark matter (DM) in the Universe remains one of the great open questions of particle astrophysics and cosmology today. The WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) DM paradigm has fallen, leaving us with a wide range of possible DM models and signatures. New methods and ideas are required to efficiently progress. I will discuss ongoing searches for axion DM signatures using radio observations of neutron stars, and discuss the potential role of black holes and gravitational waves. I will...

    Read more about ITC Colloquium - Christoph Weniger (GRAPPA, U of Amsterdam)
  • 2020 Feb 18

    ITC Seminar - Coral Wheeler (Carnegie)

    12:00pm to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Phillips

    "Sweating the small stuff: Or how I learned to START worrying and love the smallest galaxies"

     

    Abstract: The currently favored cosmological paradigm, Lambda Cold Dark Matter Theory (LCDM), has been widely successful in predicting the counts, clustering, colors, morphologies, and evolution of galaxies on large scales, as well as a variety of cosmological observables. Despite these successes, several challenges have arisen to this model in recent years, most of them occurring at the smallest scales — those of low mass...

    Read more about ITC Seminar - Coral Wheeler (Carnegie)
  • 2020 Feb 13

    ITC Luncheon

    12:30pm to 1:30pm

    Location: 

    Phillips

    Rachel Cochrane (ITC), “Resolving dusty, distant galaxies with observations and simulations”

    Bart Ripperda (CCA), “Magnetic reconnection and plasmoid formation in black hole accretion flows”

    Amaya Moro-Martin (STScI), “Cloudy with a chance of giant snowflakes”

    Erika Wright (CfA), “Equity in STEM Engagement: Challenges and Strategies”

  • 2020 Feb 13

    ITC Colloquium - Amaya Moro-Martin (STScI)

    11:00am to 12:00pm

    Location: 

    Pratt

    Interstellar objects and their potential role in planet formation

     

    The formation and evolution of planetary systems commonly leads to the ejection of predominantly icy objects. The expectation, therefore, is that the Galaxy has a background population of interstellar planetesimals ejected from these systems. We argue that 1I/‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar interloper that has been detected entering the solar system, is unlikely representative of such a population of isotropically distributed objects, favoring the scenario that it originated from a nearby...

    Read more about ITC Colloquium - Amaya Moro-Martin (STScI)
  • 2020 Feb 11

    ITC Seminar - Julian Munoz (Harvard Physics)

    12:00pm to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Phillips

    "Learning Cosmology with the First Stars"

    I will describe how upcoming 21-cm measurements during cosmic dawn will provide a trove of new cosmological information. This era saw the formation of the first stars, which excited neutral hydrogen and allowed it to absorb 21-cm photons from the CMB. The timing of this signal carries information on the abundance of the small mini-halos that hosted the first stars, allowing us to probe the matter power spectrum at smaller scales than currently possible. Moreover, I will describe how the relative velocities between dark matter and...

    Read more about ITC Seminar - Julian Munoz (Harvard Physics)
  • 2020 Feb 10

    ITC Seminar - Tom Louden (University of Warwick UK)

    12:00pm to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Phillips
    Climate mapping of exoplanets
    I will present a new analysis of the high resolution spectrum of WASP-49b using Terminator, a code developed to spatially resolve the atmospheres of exoplanets.
    Simulations of hot Jupiters with GCM's predict the presence of a strong equatorial jet, as well as a day-to-night flow. Without spatial resolution, it is only possible to measure a global average velocity of the planet, and hence it is not possible to disentangle these contributions.
    Transit Limb Scanning makes it possible to spatially resolve the atmosphere of an exoplanet during... Read more about ITC Seminar - Tom Louden (University of Warwick UK)
  • 2020 Feb 06

    ITC Luncheon

    12:30pm to 1:30pm

    Location: 

    Phillips
    Boryana Hadzhiyska (CfA)
    "Limitations to the ‘basic’ HOD model and beyond”

    Jack Steiner (CfA)
    “Fast Spectral-Timing Analysis of Black Hole X-ray Binaries with NICER”

    Mario Jurić (UW)
     "Astronomy Data Commons: Archives in the Clouds”

    Paul Schechter (MIT)
    "The images of a strongly lensed quasar lie very close to the two (or
    four) intersections of Witt's hyperbola and Wynne's ellipse."
  • 2020 Feb 06

    ITC Colloquium -Mario Jurić (U of Washington)

    11:00am to 12:00pm

    Location: 

    Pratt
    Minimoons to Planet X: Mapping Solar System Populations with ZTF and LSST

    The small bodies of the Solar System are a valuable tracer of its present-day structure, its evolution, and ultimately provide clues into the early times of its formation. In the next 5 years, the known sample of all small body populations will grow 10-50x, driven largely by large survey programs. For example, the LSST alone will generate a billion measurements of millions of Solar System objects, with simulations predicting ~100,000 new discoveries of nearby NEOs (Jones et al. 2017), 5.5 million for the main... Read more about ITC Colloquium -Mario Jurić (U of Washington)

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