Physics Colloquium – Charlotte Ward

Better Together: Combining the Strengths of Rubin, Euclid, and Roman for Time-domain Science and Cosmology

Charlotte Ward
Assistant Professor, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Eberly College of Sciences at Penn State

We have entered an exciting decade for survey science, with space-based surveys such as Euclid and Roman and ground-based surveys such as Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) providing overlapping imaging datasets across the optical and IR. LSST will identify thousands of tidal disruption events (TDEs) and millions of AGN and supernovae – including hundreds of gravitationally lensed supernovae (gLSNe) from which we can measure the Hubble Constant. I will discuss how joint analysis of ground and space-based data via multi-resolution forward modeling methods is enabling us to identify AGN and TDEs from non-nuclear massive black holes, undertake time delay cosmography with populations of gLSNe, and study the environments of supernovae and AGN. I will also discuss our work on understanding accretion disk physics and radio jet formation in state-changing AGN, which are important probes of super-Eddington accretion and the duty cycle of massive black hole growth.