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  • Coffeeshop Astrophysics – Space Rocks and Stardust

    Anodyne Coffee Shop 224 W Bruce Street, Milwaukee, WI, United States

    Space Rocks and Stardust Speakers: Pratyasha Gitika, Tamal RoyChowdhury, Laila Vleeschower Are shooting stars really stars falling from the sky? Spoiler alert: they’re not! Those quick flashes of light are actually tiny bits of space dust and rock burning up …

  • CGCA Seminar – Prof. Sharon Morsink

    Kenwood IRC 2175 Milwaukee, WI, United States

    The masses and radii of the neutron stars observed by NICER
    Prof. Sharon Morsink
    University of Alberta

    Neutron stars are the densest known gravitationally-stable objects in the Universe. Their strong gravitational fields, rapid rotation rates, and supra-nuclear central densities allow for a fascinating interplay between general relativistic effects and nuclear physics theory. Pulse-profile modeling is a technique that uses the gravitationally-lensed X-ray flux emitted from hot spots on the neutron star's surface to infer its mass and radius. General relativity is a crucial ingredient in this analysis.

  • Physics Colloquium – Julian May Mann

    Chemistry 108 2050 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, WI, United States

    Physics Colloquium - Julian May Mann, Stanford University Presentation title and abstract will be announced when they are available.

  • CGCA Seminar – Dr. Logan Prust

    Kenwood IRC 2175 Milwaukee, WI, United States

    Frame-Dragging Reveals Central Engine of a Superluminous Supernova
    Dr. Logan Prust
    Center for Computational Astrophysics - Simons Foundation

    Type I superluminous supernovae (SLSNe-I) are an order of magnitude brighter than standard supernovae, with the internal power source for their luminosity still unknown. The central engines of SLSNe-I are hypothesized to be magnetars, but many SLSNe-I light curves exhibit multiple bumps or peaks that are unexplained by the standard magnetar model.

  • Physics Colloquium – Dr. Qiuyan Chen

    Chemistry 108 2050 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, WI, United States

    Effect of Phosphorylation Barcodes on Arrestin Binding to a Chemokine Receptor
    Dr. Qiuyan Chen
    Assistant Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
    Indiana University School of Medicine

    Cells often fine-tune their responses to signals through chemical tags called phosphorylation 'barcodes' placed on receptors at the cell surface. Different G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) kinases (GRKs) add these barcodes at different sites, but how these patterns influence arrestins — key proteins that control receptor signaling and trafficking — has been unclear.

  • Coffeeshop Astrophysics – What You Probably Don’t Know About AI

    Anodyne Coffee Shop 224 W Bruce Street, Milwaukee, WI, United States

    What You Probably Don't Know About AI Speakers: Ronan Humphrey, Adam Opperman, Pratyusava Baral Over the last century, computing in science has changed from human computers doing calculations by hand to supercomputers that can perform over 1018 (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000!) operations …

  • CGCA Seminar – Samuel E. Gralla

    Kenwood IRC 2175 Milwaukee, WI, United States

    Can black holes evaporate past extremality?
    Professor Samuel E. Gralla
    University of Arizona

    Black holes with sufficiently large initial charge and mass will Hawking-evaporate towards the extremal limit. The emission slows as the temperature approaches zero, but still reaches the point where a single Hawking quantum would make the object superextremal, removing the horizon. We take this semiclassical prediction at face value and ask: When the emission occurs, what is revealed?

  • Physics Colloquium – Moritz Münchmeyer

    Chemistry 108 2050 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, WI, United States

    AI Reasoning in Theoretical Physics with the TPBench Project
    Assistant Professor Moritz Münchmeyer
    UW-Madison Department of Physics

    Large-language models are becoming powerful enough to assist physicists with mathematical reasoning at the research level. In this talk, I will first present our dataset TPBench (tpbench.org), which was constructed to benchmark and improve AI models specifically for theoretical physics.

  • Physics Colloquium – Chris Fragile

    Chemistry 108 2050 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, WI, United States

    What Are We Learning About Super-Eddington Accretion Disks From Simulations?
    Professor Chris Fragile
    Department of Physics & Astronomy, College of Charleston

    Accretion of gas onto black holes is one of the most important processes shaping our Universe. Understanding extremely high rates of accretion (dubbed 'super-Eddington') is vital to explaining the challenging observation that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are fully formed at redshifts >7. It is also important to understanding astrophysical objects such as tidal disruption events (TDEs) and ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs).

  • CGCA Seminar – Abygail Waggoner

    KIRC KEN 2175 3135 N. Maryland Ave., Milwaukee

    What’s Feeding Terrestrial Planets? JWST Observations of Protoplanetary Disk
    Dr. Abygail Waggoner
    University of Wisconsin-Madison

    The formation of terrestrial, or earth-like, planets is thought to occur in the inner few au of protoplanetary disks, but what is the composition of the dust and gas that forming-planets may inherit? In this talk, we’ll discuss how the James Webb Space Telescope can be used to measure the chemical composition of protoplanetary disk gas and how models can be used to understand the evolution of material throughout planet formation.