Speaker(s): Szabolcs Marka adn Imre Bartos, Columbia University in the City of New York Advanced LIGO's completion and ongoing observation run might put the first direct detection of gravitational waves on the horizon, just in time for the 100th anniversary of Einstein's prediction. Beyond the eventual discovery, there is a growing focus on…

Supermassive black holes, located at the centers of galaxies, are at once an extreme consequence of general relativity and the sites of energetic processes that shape the cosmos. Nevertheless, their extraordinarily compact nature has prohibited the direct study of the key gravitational and astrophysical features underlying their nature and…

Abstract | Ed Young is in Antarctica on a recovery mission for Spider. I'll give an update on the plan. Then I'll describe our plans for doing cosmology and astrophysics with SuperBIT, a new wide-field sub-arcsecond imager operating over 100 nights in the space-like environment provided by the Super Pressure Balloon Platform…

Dwarf galaxies are extremely diverse in their morphology, from rotationally-supported star-forming disks to gas-free spheroidal stellar systems with no star-formation and negligible rotation. We use cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to show that environment plays a significant role on the assembly history, star formation and globular…

Abstract | From satellites orbiting about the Earth to the large-scale structure of the universe, all astrophysical systems are dominated by gravitational forces. In theory, this should make it easy for us to test General Relativity (GR) and its many proposed extensions. In practice, a synthesis of all our constraints on…

Presented by, Christine Pappas, Patty Ho, Yaqiong Li, Stevie Bergman, and Anne Gambrel. Five short talks on different aspects of the instruments and analyses for Advanced ACTPol and SPIDER, putting each into context.

http://www.princeton.edu/cosmology/gravity-group-seminar/

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is an experiment to measure the signature of a gravitational-wave background from inflation in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). CLASS is a multi-frequency array of four telescopes operating from a high-altitude site in the Atacama Desert in Chile. CLASS will survey 70…

Abstract: I will show weak lensing results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Dark Energy Survey. From Sloan data we use new methods to measure the mass distributon and clustering of cosmic voids and filaments. We also measure the ellipticity of galaxy and cluster halos and relate it to the light. These new measurements of voids and…

Talk 1 Title: Backsplash in dark matter halos Abstract: Recent work has shown that halos in cosmological N-body simulations exhibit a pronounced feature in their density profiles at large radii. I will explain the origin of this newly discovered feature, and describe how it could be used as a ruler to probe cosmology. Talk 2 Title: Probing…

http://www.princeton.edu/cosmology/gravity-group-seminar/

Neutron stars offer us an excellent testbed to probe nuclear physics and strong-field gravity. Unlike the well-studied mass-radius relation for neutron stars that depends strongly on their internal structure, I first report unexpected universal relations that we found among the moment of inertia, tidal Love number and quadrupole moment ("I…

http://www.princeton.edu/cosmology/gravity-group-seminar/