This is a talk held during the regular colloquium series (usually Tuesdays at 4pm).
The results of the Gaia astrometric mission have ushered in a new era of "precision Galactic dynamics".
Over the past decade, integral field units (IFUs) have revolutionized our approach to resolved studies in nearby galaxies. Where we would typically be limited to observing proposals in which we ask for a few tens of slit positions to analyze e.g.
The evolution of massive stars is critically affected by mass loss due to stellar winds and/or binary interactions.
A diverse range of physical processes are responsible for regulating star formation across galaxies. Understanding their relative contributions to galaxy growth and quenching at different epochs is one of the key questions in galaxy evolution today.
As transient surveys become wider and faster, and followup facilities become more automated and global, we are able to discover and characterize new phase spaces of transients.
It’s often said that one data point teaches you nothing. In fact, zero data points teaches you nothing, and no magical transition happens from one to two data points.
Historically models of star forming regions in the forms of HII regions and PDRs face a fundemental limitation of reproducing present day conditions independent of cloud evolution which limits our understand of feedback to instantaneous physics.
Galactic archaeology has entered a remarkable era, with Gaia and an ensemble of spectroscopic surveys providing chemical abundances and velocities for millions of stars.
Small galaxies are key tools for understanding structure formation and galaxy evolution.
The majority of massive stars are born in binary and higher-order multiple systems, which leads to two interesting consequences. First, most massive stars will exchange mass with a binary companion at some point in their life and, secondly, most supernovae are actually from such stars.
