Events

"Detectable Changes in Astronomy"
Federica Bianco, Center for Cosmology & Particle Physics, Center for Urban Science & Progress, NYU
The way we do science in general, and astronomy in particular, is changing rapidly. I will talk about the future of astronomy at the verge of the LSST survey. As the (newly elected) LSST Science Collaborations Coordinator, I will discuss how the whole science community is preparing for this revolution: the largest astronomical survey ever planned, which starting in 2022 will image the entire southern hemisphere sky once every 3 nights to depth and spatial resolution that approach that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

"The Cosmological Context of Star Formation"
Tom Quinn, University of Washington
On the molecular cloud scale, star formation is a very complicated process that involves gravitational collapse, radiative transfer and magnetic fields on sub-parsec scales. On the other hand, there are a number of observed relationships between star formation and galactic and cosmic environment such as star formation rate - molecular surface density relationship in disk galaxies, the stellar mass - halo mass relationship, and the evolution of the star formation rate over time.

"Velocity Gradients as a New Way of Studying Galactic Magnetic Fields"
Alex Lazarian, UW-Madison
I shall introduce three new techniques of magnetic field tracing. The first two use Doppler-shifted emission lines and employs the gradients of velocity in order to trace magnetic fields in the diffuse interstellar media as well as to trace regions of star formation associated with the gravitational collapse. The differences between these techniques is that they use different observationally available measures, i.e. the first one uses the velocity centroids and the other uses velocity channel maps.

"Feedback in Dwarf Galaxies at z>2"
Ryan Trainor, Franklin & Marshall College
High-redshift dwarf galaxies (L << L*) are high-priority science targets for both JWST and current surveys: these galaxies appear extremely sensitive to stellar feedback, and they are likely to dominate the ionizing photon budget during the epoch of reionization (EoR). However, the physical properties of the stellar populations and interstellar media in these galaxies are difficult to constrain because of their extremely faint continuum and line emission.