Friday afternoon colloquia

The API colloquia are weekly meetings where people give a 45 minute overview of their work. Afterwards there is time for discussion.

The contact person for the colloquia is Carsten Dominik.

Biscuits provided


Upcoming colloquia

Finding the dark matter

David Hogg, NOVA colloquium — NYU

One of the principal goals of Gaia and surveys like it is to infer the density map and formation history of the Milky Way. I present a few toy problems in which we use phase-space information for a snapshot of tracer particles to infer the matter density within the system.

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Friday 1 June 2012, 15:00. Location: C4.174

Title not yet known

Dennis Bodewits — University of Maryland

Friday 8 June 2012, 15:00. Location: C4.174

Title not yet known

Christopf Mordasini — MPIA Heidelberg

Friday 15 June 2012, 15:00. Location: C4.174

Title not yet known

Henrik Beuther — MPIA Heidelberg

Friday 22 June 2012, 15:00. Location: C4.174

Title not yet known

Peter Abraham

Friday 29 June 2012, 15:30. Location: C4.174


Past colloquia

The multiphase extraplanar medium in spiral galaxies

George Heald — ASTRON

The continuing evolution of galaxies is linked with their connection to the external environment. Through mergers, interactions, and accretion, the structure and contents of galaxies' interstellar media can be strongly altered.

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Friday 20 April 2012, 15:00. Location: C4.174

The Discovery of Giant Gamma-ray Bubbles in the Milky Way

Meng Su — CfA

Data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveal two large gamma-ray bubbles. The gamma-ray emission associated with these bubbles (known as the Fermi Bubbles) has a significantly harder spectrum than the inverse Compton emission from cosmic ray electrons in the Galactic disk, or the gamma-rays produced by decay of pions from proton-ISM collisions.

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Friday 13 April 2012, 15:00. Location: C4.174

Close-in Planets: From Hot Jupiters to Super Mercuries

Eugene Chiang, NOVA colloquium — UCB

The closest-in planets, with periods as short as 10 hours, are now a well-established population, thanks to Doppler and transit surveys. They present a number of challenges: how did they form and achieve their tight orbits, and how do they evolve and survive in the face of intense irradiation from their parent stars?

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Friday 30 March 2012, 15:00. Location: C4.174

X-ray binaries in galaxies, star-formation and the problem of SNIa progenitors

Marat Gilfanov — Max Plank Institute for Astrophysics, Garching

The X-ray appearance of majority of normal galaxies is determined by radiation from accreting neutron stars and black holes in X-ray binaries. Chandra and XMM-Newton observations revealed that their populations scale with the star-formation rate and stellar mass of the host galaxy. Thus, the X-ray luminosity of a star-forming galaxy can be used as a star-formation rate proxy.

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Friday 23 March 2012, 15:00. Location: C4.174

Estimating gas content in galaxies from optical spectroscopy - gas masses for 200k galaxies in the SDSS

Jarle Brinchmann — Sterrenwacht Leiden

Despite its crucial importance for galaxy evolution, the gaseous phase in galaxies is much less well known than the stellar content. Here we present a new technique to determine gas content in galaxies using rest-frame optical emission line spectra.

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Friday 16 March 2012, 15:00. Location: C4.174