"The far ultra-violet background"

The diffuse far-ultraviolet (FUV) background has received considerable attention from astronomers since the seventies. The initial impetus came from the hope of detecting UV radiation from the hot intergalactic medium. The central importance of the FUV background to the physics (heating and ionization) of the diffuse atomic phases motivated the next generation of experiments.  The consensus view is that the diffuse FUV emission at high latitudes has three components: stellar FUV reflected by dust grains (diffuse... Read more about ITC Colloquium - Shri Kulkarni (Caltech)

"Testing the equivalence principle in the dark sector"

The equivalence between the inertial and gravitational mass is built-in the formulation of General Relativity as the curvature of space time. In the visible sector, the equivalence principle has been tested with extraordinary precision, but very little is known about the presence of long range fifth forces in the dark sector. In this talk I will describe how we can use cosmological data to test whether dark matter violates the equivalence principle. The Universe itself will act as a scale that measures if dark matter...

Read more about ITC Colloquium - Emanuele Castorina (University of Milano)

"Stellar Basins of Gravitationally Bound Particles"

I will describe the phenomenology of stellar basins: volumetric stellar emission into gravitationally bound orbits of weakly coupled particles such as axions, moduli, hidden photons, and fermions. While only a tiny fraction of the instantaneous luminosity of a star (the vast majority of the emission is into relativistic modes), the continual injection of these particles into a small part of phase space causes them to accumulate over astrophysically long time scales, forming a "stellar basin", in analogy with the geologic...

Read more about ITC Colloquium - Ken Van Tilburg (Flatiron)

"From Kiloparsec Scales to a Merger: Properties of Dual AGNs that Become Gravitational Wave Sources"

Observational searches for dual active galactic nuclei (AGNs) at kiloparsec separations are crucial for understanding the role of galaxy mergers in the evolution of galaxies. In addition, kiloparsec-scale dual AGNs are the parent population of merging massive black hole (MBH) binaries. In this talk I will describe our recent efforts to quantify the observational properties of dual AGNs that are most likely to result in MBH mergers and emission of gravitational waves. I will...

Read more about ITC Colloquium - Tamara Bogdanovic (Georgia Tech)