This is a talk held during the regular colloquium series (usually Tuesdays at 4pm).
In the standard cosmological LCDM model, dark matter provides the primordial potential wells in which baryons can get captured.
Decades of observational data and careful modeling show that stars dominate the gravitational field of the inner 2-3 half-mass radii of globular clusters.
On both large and small scales, galaxies are predicted to form via hierarchical assembly.
Betelgeuse's "Great Dimming" in the winter of 2020 quickly became a source of fascination for both professional and amateur astronomers.
GMT has made enormous progress in the last 5 years. Programmatically, we’ve joined forces with TMT and AURA to form the US-ELT Program and received a top ranking from Astro2020, a crucial step in gaining support from the NSF and engaging the US community.
Recent revolutionary discoveries in astronomy are showing that Earth is one of billions of planets, and that terrestrial, temperate planets are commonplace in our galaxy.
Stellar streams form as smaller gravitationally bound collections of stars are tidally torn apart by a more massive galaxy. In the coming decade, thousands of stellar streams will be observed in the halos of external galaxies.
In the last few years, the discovery of cosmic explosions has become routine: every night, robotic optical telescopes mosaic the sky with a time resolution of minutes to days and identify 10^5 candidate new transients.
Stellar mergers and common envelope phases represent dramatic moments of stellar interaction in stellar lifetimes. Despite their presumed existence for nearly 50 years, the details of these events have remained uncertain.
When and how does environment impact the evolution of galaxies? We will approach this question by considering two extreme environments. First: The cores of massive clusters. Here, the largest, reddest galaxies of the local universe are found, Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs).
