Colloquium

Roughly half of the elements in our Universe heavier than iron are produced via the rapid neutron-capture (r-)process.

Star-forming galaxies are often observed to have galactic winds - gas that is being ejected from the galaxy in phases ranging from cold molecular clouds to hot X-ray emitting plasma.

The stellar mass of star forming galaxies is thought to increase in a quasi-steady state, where the rate depends on the gas fraction and star formation efficiency, which evolve with redshift.

N-body simulations are now the standard approach to studying non- linear structure formation. With ~trillion particle simulations now possible, containing many billions of dark matter halos, measures of key quantities (such as the halo mass function) can be made at extremely high precision.

I will discuss work using cosmological hydrodynamic simulations with full physics models to explain some outstanding problems of modelling the intergalactic medium and related absorption systems.

Binary stars are common, and exert an outsize impact on many areas of astrophysics. They are the source of a wide range of phenomena from type Ia supernovae to gravitational wave sources.

In recent years, the number of known galaxy clusters at has grown dramatically thanks in large part to the success of surveys utilizing the Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect.

MagNIFIES is the Magellans' Near-Infrared Five-band Immersion grating Efficient Spectrograph, a project to bring the GMT instrument GMTNIRS to Magellan before GMT needs it.