spring-2019

12:40 - 1:30 PM every Thursday, location = 131 A & B Campbell Hall.

Students can register for this seminar as ASTRON 292

    • To volunteer for a 12 minute talk + 4 minutes for questions, send email to Paul Kalas (kalas@berkeley.edu).

  • This forum is mainly for local scientists of any level to present their work to a broad spectrum of the department, and usually includes one short talk by the astronomy colloquium speaker of the day.

  • Subjects can include personal scientific research, reporting on other work appearing in journals, education and public outreach efforts, science policy, and professional development issues.

  • It is preferred if speakers bring their own laptop, cable adapter, and pointer. Presentations may also use the whiteboard.

  • Scientists from other institutions need to have a local scientist hosting their visit to Berkeley before they can request a talk slot.

Bold means confirmed

January 24:

    • Sean Ressler (UC Berkeley) - 5 Flux Given: Predicting the Horizon-Scale Magnetic Flux In the Galactic Center (And Why You Should Care)

    • Alessandro Sonnenfeld (Leiden) - A Hyper Suprime-Cam view of the CMASS galaxy sample

    • Jennifer Johnson (OSU) colloq. speaker - Mercury, Venus, or Earth -- Testing the Mass-Radius relations for rocky planets

January 31:

    • Abigail (Abi) Polin (UC Berkeley) - Exploding Sub-Chandrasekhar mass White Dwarfs as Type Ia Supernovae

    • Megan Ansdell (UC Berkeley) - Deep Learning for Exoplanet Transit Science

    • Patrick Brady (UWM) colloq. speaker - Cosmology with gravitational wave observations

February 7:

    • Thaddeus (Tad) Komacek (U. Chicago) - The Atmospheric Circulation of Ultra-Hot Jupiters

    • Dick Plambeck (UC Berkeley) - The Salty Disk around a Massive Protostar

    • Eugene Chiang (UC Berkeley) colloq. speaker - Stellar Winds and Dust Avalanches in Debris Disks

February 14:

    • Dhruv Muley (UC Berkeley) - PDS 70: A transition disk sculpted by a single planet

  • Paul Kalas (UC Berkeley) - The international beta Pic transit monitoring campaign

    • Tuan Do (UCLA) colloq. speaker - Intermediate Mass Black Holes with TMT

February 21:

    • Uros Seljak (UC Berkeley) - EL2O: posterior inference without MCMC

    • Barry Welsh (UC Berkeley) - Exocomets in the news

    • Hiranya Peiris (UCL) colloq. speaker - Bayesian-optimised emulation of cosmological simulations

February 28:

    • Rob De Rosa (Stanford) - Exploring the Dynamical History of the HD 106906 Planetary System with Gaia

    • Anne-Marie Lagrange (Grenoble) - TBD

    • George Ricker (MIT) colloq. speaker - Tossin' and Turnin' of TESS

March 7:

    • Ben Margalit (UC Berkeley) - a, b, c, d, e, FRB, GRB? Back to basics in learning how to make fast radio bursts

    • Irina Ene (UC Berkeley) - Stellar kinematics of the centers of MASSIVE elliptical galaxies

    • Shelley Wright (UCSD) colloq. speaker - An all-sky observatory searching for optical transients and technosignatures

March 14:

    • Fatima Abdurrahman (UC Berkeley) - Late-Time, High-Resolution Images of the Black Hole Candidate Microlensing Events MACHO-98-BLG-6 And MACHO-96-BLG-5

    • Peter Boyle (UC Berkeley) - Structure of the Super Star Cluster Westerlund I

    • Ian Czekala (UC Berkeley) - Circumbinary Planets and Disks

March 21:

    • Nicholas Rui (UC Berkeley) - Dynamical Structure of the Quintuplet Cluster

    • Stephen Rho (UC Berkeley) - A Gallery of Shock Portraits from Failed Supernovae

    • Jens Kauffman (MIT) - LEGO: From Molecular Lines in the Milky Way to Cosmic Star Formation

March 28: UC Berkeley Spring Break

April 4:

    • Xiangcheng Ma (UC Berkeley) - Resolving star cluster formation in high-redshift galaxies in cosmological simulations

    • Kareem El-Badry (UC Berkeley) - A new model for superbubbles driven by clustered supernovae

    • Josh Eisner (Arizona) colloq. speaker - Gaps and Holes in Very Young Circumstellar Disks

April 11:

    • Andrea Antoni (UC Berkeley) - The Evolution of Binaries in a Gaseous Medium: Three-Dimensional Simulations of Binary Bondi-Hoyle-Lyttleton Accretion

    • Anna Ho (Caltech) - SN2018gep: The Death Throes of a Stripped Massive Star

    • Steve Kahn (LSST/Stanford) colloq. speaker - Searching for Subsecond Stellar Variability with Wide-field Star Trails and Deep Learning

April 18:

    • Manik Varma (Microsoft) - The Extremes of Machine Learning – Collaboration Opportunities in Astronomy

    • Ben Horowitz (UCB) - Constrained Reconstruction of the High Redshift Cosmic Web from Lyman Alpha Tomography

    • Shepard Doelman (Harvard) colloq. speaker - TBD

April 25:

    • Jessica Lu (UC Berkeley) - KAPA’s AstroTech - A New Summer School for Astronomical Instrumentation

    • Chris McKee (UC Berkeley) - Update on NASA, NSF and the Decadal Survey

    • Marijana Smailagic (UCSC) - Cool gas around massive quenched galaxies

May 2:

    • Randolf Klein (SOFIA) - The PDR in M17-SW analyzed with FIFI-LS onboard SOFIA

    • Stuart Bale (SSL) - First perihelia passes of Parker Solar Probe

  • Miguel Zumalacarregui (LBL) - Testing Dark Energy and Gravity with Gravitational Wave Propagation