2021
KICP Colloquium: Rebecca Leane (Stanford University)
4:00–5:00 pm Zoom
Rebecca Leane (Stanford University) “Dark Matter in Stars and Planets”
Tuesday Lunch Seminar: Jamie Law-Smith (University of California, Santa Cruz)
12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Interactions between black holes, stars, and galaxies
Jamie Law-Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz
A physical understanding of the high energy interactions between black holes, stars, and neutron stars, coupled with the context of their galactic birthplaces, will allow us to use these systems as tools to better understand black holes at all masses, the lives and deaths of stars, and the dynamics in galactic centers. In this talk, I will discuss one particular interaction: the tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole. I will present the STARS library of tidal disruption event simulations and will show that all our simulations can be reduced to a single relationship. I will present the chemical structure of the disks formed after tidal disruption—a key step in understanding the spectra of these events. I will also connect these AU-scale events to kpc-scale galaxy physics: I will present a systematic study of tidal disruption event host galaxies in the context of the local galaxy population, and in particular our finding that they are highly centrally concentrated. We expect ~50,000 tidal disruption events detected with LSST over 10 years, allowing us to use these events as unprecedented probes of supermassive black hole demographics, nuclear stellar populations, the physics of super-Eddington accretion, and dynamical mechanisms operating in galactic centers.
KICP Seminar: Jose Luis Bernal (Johns Hopkins University)
12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Jose Luis Bernal (Johns Hopkins University) “The trouble with H0 (and beyond)”
A&A Colloquium: Michael McDonald (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
3:30–4:30 pm Zoom
Understanding the Limitations and Evolution of Black Hole Feedback in Massive Galaxies
Energetic feedback from supermassive black holes is thought to be responsible for preventing star formation in massive galaxies, including our own Milky Way. The most massive galaxies in the Universe, which live at the centers of galaxy clusters, provide a unique, “high-contrast” opportunity to study the details of this feedback. I will present a summary of work from our group studying the limitations and details of black hole feedback in massive galaxies, the evolution of the cooling/feedback balance over ~10 Gyr, and what we have learned about lower-mass galaxies by studying these most-massive systems. I will finish with a summary of other cluster research, and a look ahead to the future of research in this field.
KICP Seminar: Katelin Schutz (MIT)
12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Katelin Schutz (MIT) “Making dark matter out of light: the cosmology of sub-MeV freeze-in”
KICP Colloquium: Julia Selton (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
3:30–4:30 pm Zoom
Julia Selton (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) “Nonstandard thermal histories and the small-scale matter power spectrum”
KICP Seminar: Josh Speagle (University of Toronto)
12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Josh Speagle (University of Toronto) “Cosmological Cartography with Photometric Redshifts”
A&A Colloquium: Chung-Pei Ma (University of California, Berkeley)
3:30–4:30 pm Zoom - for link, please contact, Laticia Rebeles, lrebeles@oddjob.uchicago.edu
Supermassive Black Holes in Nearby Galaxies
For over three decades, the giant elliptical galaxy M87 had hosted the most massive known black hole in the local universe. New observational data in the past several years have substantially expanded dynamical measurements of black hole masses at the centers of nearby galaxies.
I will describe recent progress in discovering a new population of ultra-massive black holes in local elliptical galaxies. These black holes are revising our understanding of the symbiotic relationship between black holes and galaxies, and of the gravitational wave signals from merging binaries targeted by ongoing pulsar timing array experiments.
KICP Seminar: Mikhail Ivanov (NYU Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics)
12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Mikhail Ivanov (NYU Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics), “Fundamental Cosmology from Galaxy Clustering”
KICP Colloquium: Gilbert Holder (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
3:30–4:30 pm Zoom
Gilbert Holder (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)“The time variable mm-wave sky”