Special Seminars

Missileman The Secret Life of Cold War Engineer WALLACE CLAUSON John Clauson grew up believing he was the son of an IBM salesman. Though the family moved often and John’s father, Wallace Clauson, rarely spoke of his work, his family never questioned him...

"The Neutral Islands during the Late Epoch of Reionization" Abstract: Th e growth of isolated ionized regions during the early stage of reionization is well described by the “bubble model”. However, the basic assumption of isolated and spherical ionized...

"The Formation and Evolution of Close Binaries and Planets " Abstract: The formation and orbital migration of close binaries and planets remain a mystery. The majority of very close binaries have outer tertiary companions, suggesting Kozai-Lidov...

How Black Holes Shape Globular Clusters Recent numerical simulations and observational indications have suggested that globular clusters (GCs) may contain large populations of stellar-mass black holes (BHs). This has important implications to...

“The Primordial Lithium Problem” Abstract: Big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) remains one of the major pillars of modern cosmology. A comparison of predicted and observationally-inferred primordial 2H and 4He abundances implies a baryon density in excellent...

"Declining rotation curves, missing baryons and the origin of turbulence: the puzzling properties of high-redshift disk galaxies" Abstract: The redshift 2 universe is one of the most interesting epochs of galaxy evolution. It is the era with the peak of...

"A new era for optical interferometry with VLTI GRAVITY" Abstract: The second generation instrument GRAVITY uses phase-referencing to achieve a > 100x improvement in sensitivity when combining the 4 8m telescopes at the VLTI. I will discuss science cases...

"Schrödinger Evolution of Self-Gravitating Disks" An understanding of the long-term evolution of self-gravitating disks ranks among the classic outstanding problems of astrophysics. In this talk, I will show that under suitable assumptions, the secular...

"Charged compact star mergers, fast radio bursts, and relativistic astronomy" Abstract: I will discuss three topics. First, I will discuss the effect of the charge of a compact object in binary compact star mergers (BH-BH, NS-BH & NS-NS) and argue that a...

" Using Image Subtraction to Search for Planets and Variables in Crowded Stellar Fields" Abstract: Open clusters and globular clusters serve as useful astrophysical laboratories, containing an assemblage of coeval stars sharing similar distances and...