News and Events
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A toy model of galaxy evolution inspired by stellar metallicity measurements from the SAMI survey
Wednesday December 2nd 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Dr Sam Vaughan The University of Sydney Email: sam.vaughan[at]sydney.edu.au Abstract Nearby galaxies can be divided into two broad categories: those which have blue colours, disc-like morphologies and are forming stars; and those which are red, have spheroidal morphologies and have ceased their star formation. Explaining why this is the case is a key challenge of …
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CMB Cosmology with BICEP/Keck and SPT-3G
Wednesday November 25th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Dr Neil Goeckner-Wald KIPAC Email: ngoecknerwald[@]gmail.com Abstract Precision measurements of the anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) have become one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. One major objective of current CMB experiments is the discovery of a stochastic background of gravitational waves generically produced by theories of cosmic inflation. Such a signal could …
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Veloce – and what it takes to open new discovery phase space for exoplanets, without spending a bomb.
Wednesday November 18th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Prof Chris Tinney UNSW Email: c.tinney[at]unsw.edu.au Abstract Breakthrough discoveries in astronomy invariably come through one of two routes - applying established techniques to new classes of objects discovered from new classes of surveys, or pushing established techniques to new levels of precision to make available previously unexplored observational phase space. Examples of the former include …
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The evolution (or not) of the star formation efficiency, dust content, and duty cycle of high-z galaxies
Wednesday November 11th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Dr Jordan Mirocha McGill University Email: jordan.mirocha[at]mcgill.ca Abstract A relatively simple model has emerged in recent years that can explain the bulk properties of high redshift galaxies: star formation is fueled by the inflow of pristine material from the intergalactic medium, and proceeds with an efficiency that depends strongly on the mass of a galaxy's …
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Can uncertainties in the evolution of the massive stars explain EM and GW observations?
Wednesday October 21st 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Poojan Agrawal Swinburne University Email: pagrawal[at]swin.edu.au Abstract Recent observations of galaxies and star clusters have highlighted the need for systematic studies dedicated to exploring the impact of uncertain parameters of stellar evolution on the properties of stellar populations. While the use of fitting formulae to stellar tracks remains a popular choice for modelling stellar evolution …
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Probing the nature of dark matter with galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing
Wednesday October 14th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Dorota Bayer Swinburne University Email: dbayer[at]swin.edu.au Abstract While a direct detection of the dark-matter particle remains very challenging, the nature of dark matter can potentially be constrained indirectly -- by comparing the properties of substructure in galactic haloes with predictions from the phenomenological dark-matter models, such as the cold, warm or hot dark matter. Whereas …
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Real or not real? What cosmological simulations can (and cannot) tell us about the cold phase of the CGM
Wednesday September 30th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Dr Lilian Garratt-Smithson University of Western Australia Email: lilian.garratt-smithson[at]uwa.edu.au Abstract Simulations are now allowing us to probe the scales of the CGM (circumgalactic medium) around galaxies in order to look at the influence of realistic galaxy formation processes. However, it is apparent that the properties of the multi-phase CGM are not yet converged in simulations …
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Precision weak lensing and the dispersion in the stellar-to-halo mass relation.
Wednesday September 16th 2020 @12pm, Zoom Colloquium Pol Gurri Perez Swinburne University Email: pgurriperez@swin.edu.au Abstract Weak gravitational lensing provides an observational avenue to determine the relation between the halo mass and stellar mass of a galaxy. While we expect two galaxies with the same stellar mass to have different halos, at the moment, existing weak lensing studies are only sensitive to an …
A list of recent colloquia, with slides in some cases, can be found here.