Meeting Time and Format
During Fall and Spring terms, the Astrophysics Seminar/Journal Club meets in 338 Gallalee Hall on
- Wednesdays from 2:00–3:00 p.m. and
- Fridays from 2:00–3:00 p.m.
Anyone in the department may attend.
During Summer, we are meeting via Zoom during our normal Friday time. Please contact one of the organizers for the Zoom meeting information and to be added to the notifications email list.
On Wednesday’s we participate in the live broadcast of colloquium talks hosted by NASA/AURA’s Space Telescope Science Institute. The schedule for the talks is available on the Space Telescope Science Institute website.
The Friday meeting consists of two segments:
- 20-minute talk (+10 minute discussion)
- article summary and discussion (5-10 minutes)
Volunteering for Article Summaries
Please send your articles to Dean Townsley and Jimmy Irwin.
Please propose articles that are fairly recent (within a few months or so), are of interest to you, and you feel you can digest and summarize well. Check out the list of previously presented articles.
Where to Find Articles
- astro-ph on arXiv: “the firehose,” raw and unfettered
- The Astrophysical Journal: the main U.S. journal for astrophysics
- The Astrophysical Journal: Letters: short articles selected to highlight topics of broad interest
- The Astronomical Journal: complement of ApJ with slightly more observation-oriented content
- Astronomy and Astrophysics: main European journal, letters section at the beginning of each issue, each issue sectioned by topic (not all topics appear in each issue)
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: main British journal, also has a letters section.
- Astroparticle Physics: some IceCube results are published here, also a good place for dark matter and cosmic ray work
- Physical Review D: broader scope — this is the Physical Review section that includes particle astrophysics and cosmology
Topics for Fall 2021
| Date | Talk (Speaker, Article) | Summary (Speaker, Article) |
|---|---|---|
| 8/20 | Organizational | |
| 8/27 | Anna Parul
“The dynamical origins of the Pisces-Eridanus stream” |
Sreetama Goswami
“Light bending and X-ray echoes from behind a supermassive black hole” Wilkins et al. (arXiv:2107.13555) Praphull Kumar “Solar inertial modes: Observations, identification, and diagnostic promise” Gizon et al. (2021 A&A, 652, L6) |
| 9/3 | Shahram Talei
“Trinity I: Self-Consistently Modeling the Dark Matter Halo-Galaxy-Supermassive Black Hole Connection from z=0-10” Zhang et al. (arXiv:2105.10474) |
Ava Ghadimi
“Search for Very High-Energy Emission from the millisecond pulsar PSR J0218+4232” Acclari et al. (arXiv:2108.11373) RileyAnne Sharpe “Diffuse Synchrotron Emission Associated with the Starburst in the Circumnuclear Disk of NGC 1275” Nagal & Kawakatu (arXiv:2105.11073) |
| 9/10 | Marko Micic
“Multiwavelength search for intermediate-mass black holes. A new sample of (wandering) candidates” (own work) |
Wei-dong Jin
“Locating the gamma-ray emission region in the brightest Fermi-LAT Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars” Acharyya et al. (arXiv:2011.01073) Anna Parul “The (im)possibility of strong chemical tagging” Casamiquela et al. (arXiv:2108.13431) |
| 9/17 | Ava Ghadimi
“The diffuse gamma-ray background is dominated by star-forming galaxies” Roth et al. (2021 Nature, 597, 341) Sreetama Goswami “Ultrahigh energy cosmic rays and high energy astrophysical neutrinos” Muzlo et al. (arXiv:2108.05512) |
|
| 9/24 | Nilotpal Mukherjee
“Resolution Dependence of White Dwarf Detonations Using Flash” (own work) |
Jacob Morgan
“The optical morphologies of galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation: a comparison to Pan-STARRS observations” Rodriguez-Gomez et al. (arXiv:1809.08239) |
| 10/1 | Wenhao Li
“SDSS-IV MaNGA: identification of active galactic nuclei in optical integral field unit surveys” Wylezalek et al. (2018MNRAS.474.1499W)
|
Sam Boos
“Multi-Dimensional Radiative Transfer Calculations of Double Detonations of Sub-Chandrasekhar-Mass White Dwarfs” Shen et al. (arXiv:2108.12435) Jeremy Quijano “A New Challenge for Dark Matter Models” Safarzadeh & Loeb (arXiv:2107.03478) Marko Micic “A transient radio source consistent with a merger-triggered core collapse supernova” Dong et al (Science 2021, 373, 1125) |
| 10/8 | Annelia Anderson
“Using cosmological simulations and synthetic absorption spectra to assess the accuracy of observationally derived CGM metallicities” Marra et al. (arXiv:2108.03254) |
Kavya Mukundan
“Kiloparsec-scale AGN Outflows and Feedback in Merger-Free Galaxies” Smethurst et al. (arXiv:2108.05361) Shahram Talei “The abundance of satellites around Milky Way- and M31-like galaxies with the TNG50 simulation: a matter of diversity” Engler et al. (2021MNRAS.507.4211E) |
| 10/15 | Sam Boos | |
| 10/22 | Nethra Rajavel, Kavya Mukundan | |
| 10/29 | Fall break | |
| 11/5 | Wei-dong Jin | Nethra Rajavel, Annelia Anderson, Wenhao Li |
| 11/12 | Jeremy Quijano, Mason Footh | |
| 11/19 | Praphull Kumar | Nilotpal Mukherjee, Mason Footh |
| 11/26 | Thanksgiving | |
| 12/3 | RileyAnne Sharpe, Jacob Morgan |