Events Archive

Sarah Marie Bruno, Princeton University 
"The projected impact of commercial satellite constellations on ground-based astronomy"

Throughout the past three decades, the analysis of spectroscopic surveys has focussed around the two-point function of the galaxy overdensity field, masquerading either as the correlation function or the Fourier-space power spectrum. Today, theoretical interest has shifted towards other statistics, in particular the higher-point functions.

Every analysis of cosmic microwave background observations faces the challenge of compressing large amounts of data into the comparatively tiny spaces of power spectra and cosmological parameters.

Adri Duivenvoorden, Zack Li, Brandon Hensley, Jo Dunkley, and Lyman Page will update us on the status of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT).

We will kick off this season with a "Meet the Gravity Group" event. The format will be the same as last year's: all of us, be we juniors getting started on our Fall papers or emeritus, will get one slide and one minute to introduce ourselves to our new colleagues and share our spring / summer updates with the group.

Justin Ripley, Princeton University "Modeling the 'ringdown' of a Kerr black hole"

Large angular scale polarimetry of the CMB will provide powerful constraints on the cosmological parameters r, the tensor-to-scalar ratio, and tau, the optical depth to the epoch of reionization.

Searches for inflationary gravitational wave signals in the CMB B-mode polarization are expected to reach unprecedented power over the next decade. A major difficulty in these ongoing searches is that Galactic foregrounds such as dust can easily mimic inflationary signals.

Abstract: Accurate understanding of astrophysical foregrounds is crucial in recovering the underlying CMB signal. In this talk I will discuss the design and performance of a camera that will be powerful at characterizing synchrotron emissions. The camera is comprised of slotted bowtie antenna elements coherently summed in a...