News and Events

Wednesday 01 Dec 2021 @ 12:00 p.m., Zoom Dr Anitha Ravishankar, University of Calgary; Email: anitha.ravishanka1[at]ucalgary.ca Abstract An accurate understanding of the propagation of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) is crucial in the prediction of space weather. CMEs generate geomagnetic storms causing catastrophic damages to power grids on Earth and are serious radiation threat to satellites on low-Earth orbit and their crew during spacewalks. …

Wednesday 24 Nov 2021 @ 12:00 p.m., Zoom Prof Will Percival, University of Waterloo; Email: will.percival[at]uwaterloo.ca Abstract Observational astrophysics consists of making inferences about the Universe by comparing data and models. The credible intervals placed on model parameters are often as important as the maximum a posteriori probability values, as the intervals indicate concordance or discordance between models and with measurements from other …

Wednesday 17 Nov 2021 @ 12:00 p.m., Zoom Brenna Mockler, University of California, Santa Cruz; Email: bmockler[at]ucsc.edu Abstract Tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide an exciting opportunity to study supermassive black holes in quiescent galaxies and the stellar populations and dynamics in galactic nuclei. They regularly produce super-Eddington mass fallback rates, and their light curves encode information about the accretion processes and the masses …

Wednesday 10 Nov 2021 @ 12:00 p.m., Zoom Dr Sree Oh, ANU; Email: sree.oh[at]anu.edu.au Abstract We investigate the stellar kinematics of the bulge and disk components and ionised gas using SAMI 3D spectroscopy data. The spatially resolved rotation velocity (V) and velocity dispersion (σ) of bulge and disk components have been simultaneously estimated using the penalised pixel fitting (PPXF) method with photometrically defined …

Wednesday 03 Nov 2021 @ 12:00 p.m., Zoom Associate Professor Stas Shabala, University of Tasmania; Email: stanislav.shabala[at]utas.edu.au Abstract Relativistic jets associated with supermassive black holes are remarkable beasts. They are the most luminous objects in the radio sky; they accelerate particles to the highest energies known; and - by transferring some fraction of their enormous kinetic energy to the surrounding gas (so-called “AGN …

Wednesday 27 Oct 2021 @ 12:00 p.m., Zoom Dr Amit Seta, ANU; Email: amit.seta[at]anu.edu.au Abstract Magnetic fields are a dynamically important component of the interstellar medium of the Milky Way. Pulsars can act as an excellent probe of the Milky Way magnetic field. The average strength of the Galactic magnetic field component parallel to the line of sight can be estimated as 1.232 …

Wednesday 20 Oct 2021 @ 12:00 p.m., Zoom Kaley Brauer, MIT; Email: kbrauer[at]mit.edu Abstract The motions and chemical composition of the stars currently present in the extended outskirts (the stellar halo) of a galaxy preserve a record of the galaxy’s formation history. While most of the stars in the center and disk of a galaxy formed in situ, many of the stars in …

Wednesday 13 Oct 2021 @ 12:00 p.m., Zoom Ryan Turner, Swinburne University; Email: rjturner[at]swin.edu.au Abstract A key method for understanding the physics of dark energy and gravity in the Universe is to measure the growth of cosmic structure with time. A powerful technique for tracing the growth of structure is to use the peculiar velocities of galaxies, and their correlations. Peculiar velocities describe …