This is a talk held during the regular colloquium series (usually Tuesdays at 4pm).
How a massive star ends its life depends upon how that life has been lived - the rotation, mass and composition it was born with, mass loss and exchange, and the complex convective and nuclear burning episodes it experienced along the way.
Precision tests of cosmology using gravitational waves will only be possible with improvements to detector sensitivity.
The properties of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies provide critical clues to how galaxies form. However, the number of Milky Way satellites and their properties do not fully agree with well-established cosmological models. The SAGA (Satellites Around Galactic Analogs) survey is a long-term prog
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.
