Past Colloquia
Extrasolar Weather and Dust: on the Occurrence of Great Red Spots and Asteroid Belts
Cody Hall
Stanimir Metchev (The University of Western Ontario)
January 30, 2015
14:00 - 15:00
The detection of global weather phenomena in irradiated extrasolar hot Jupiters has provided tremendous insights into their atmospheric structure. Non-irradiated substellar atmospheres probe weather in an entirely different regime, where global atmospheric flows result primarily from a combination of rapid rotation and internal convection –…
Variable Stars as Precision Distance Indicators: From the Local Group to the Hubble Constant
Cody Hall
Vicky Scowcroft (Carnegie Observatories)
January 23, 2015
14:00 - 15:00
Variable stars have been used as distance indicators for the past 100 years, but it is only in the last few years that we have truly reached the era of “precision” distance indicators. In this talk, I will discuss my work using mid infrared observations…
The Dynamical Mass in Spiral Disks
Cody Hall
Matthew Bershady (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
January 16, 2015
14:00 - 15:00
A small fraction of the universe’s energy-density is comprised of normal matter. A still smaller fraction is bound into stars and gas that we can see and are responsible for life. This talk examines what we know about the baryon content in galaxies thought to…
Reconstructing the Formation Histories of Massive Galaxies
Cody Hall
Mariska Kriek (UC Berkeley)
January 09, 2015
14:00 - 15:00
In past years, large and deep photometric and spectroscopic surveys have significantly advanced our understanding of galaxy growth, from the most active time in the universe (z~2) to the present day. In particular, the evolution in stellar mass, star formation rate, and structure of complete…
Gas Clouds Where They Should Not Be, and Other Recent Discoveries of the Green Bank Telescope
Cody Hall
Felix J. (Jay) Lockman (National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank)
December 09, 2014
14:00 - 15:00
In this talk I’ll review some recent discoveries made with the Green Bank Radio Telescope in areas ranging from the structure of the Lunar surface, to astrochemistry, pulsar physics, rocks in Orion, and cosmology. The special focus will be on current work on the…
Eighth Karl W. Kamper Memorial Lecture: The radio sky at 1000 frames per second: Discovery of the Fast Radio Bursts and Millisecond Pulsars
Cody Hall
Matthew Bailes (Swinburne University of Technology)
December 05, 2014
14:00 - 15:00
Seven years ago Lorimer et al. (2007) reported the discovery of what appeared to be the first bona fide case of an extragalactic dispersed radio burst, with an estimated peak flux of 30 Jy. Known as the Lorimer burst, it failed to repeat but had…
X-ray observations of active galactic nuclei
Cody Hall
Luigi Gallo (Saint Mary's University)
November 28, 2014
14:00 - 15:00
X-ray observations of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) reveal the physics at work in the region closest to the black hole event horizon. I will discuss some of the most sensitive X-ray observations of AGNs and describe the processes responsible for the complex spectral appearance and…
Surveying the Southern Skies with the SkyMapper Telescope
MP202
Brian P. Schmidt (Australian National University)
November 21, 2014
15:00 - 16:00
SkyMapper is a 1.35m telescope equipped with a 268-Million pixel CCD array that is currently surveying the Southern Sky. I will discuss the history of the telescope, its scientific capability, and key science projects for the telescope, which include a 6-colour, multi-epoch survey of…
Revealing Planet Formation through High-Contrast Imaging of Exoplanets and Circumstellar Debris
Cody Hall
Michael Fitzgerald (UCLA)
November 14, 2014
14:00 - 15:00
The past two decades have seen major advances in our understanding of the formation of planetary systems beyond our own. To date, the techniques that have detected the vast majority of planets around other stars are most sensitive to planets close to their host stars,…
How to Make Massive Stars
Cody Hall
Qizhou Zhang (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
November 07, 2014
14:00 - 15:00
Massive stars dominate the appearance and the evolution of galaxies. Despite their prominent role in shaping on the dynamics and chemistry of interstellar medium, their birth is still poorly understood. In the Milky Way, most young massive stars are found in parsec-scale molecular clumps with…