Astrophysics & Planetary Sciences Colloquium

Please join us for a very special Round Robin Colloquium. For those of you who are unfamiliar, for the Round Robin Colloquium, all members and affiliates of the APS department who are able are invited to add a slide to the slide deck and will have one minute to introduce themselves to the department.  This is a great way to get to know everyone in the huge and fabulous APS department.

As usual, please join us in the APS office at 11:45 for coffee, snax, and fun. 

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Coffee and cookies 11:45AM in the APS Office.

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Abstract: Supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries are extremely powerful sources of gravitational waves (GWs) at ~ nanoHertz to milliHertz frequencies. They are likely candidates to explain the evidence for a nanoHertz GW background recently presented by pulsar timing arrays (PTAs).

Abstract: More than one hundred years ago, exploration of the Earth's polar regions reached a fever pitch. Competition for the South Pole ultimately led to scientific discoveries whose legacy persists to the present day. Similarly, the poles of the Moon have become a new frontier for science and exploration. Perennial shadows in near-polar craters -- many of them named for famous Antarctic explorers -- remain cold enough, < 100 K, to trap water and other volatiles for billions of years. Where might these volatiles come from?

Abstract: Brown dwarfs and directly imaged self-luminous exoplanets are interesting and complex worlds that form a critical stepping stone along the path to imaging Earth-like planets. By examining their atmospheres in detail we can better understand their thermal profiles, chemical composition, and cloud properties that are tightly coupled with their formation and evolution. In this talk, I will explain how I use atmospheric retrievals, a powerful inverse modeling technique, to examine the atmospheres of brown dwarfs.

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