Colloquia Schedule Fall 2011
Colloquia are on Tuesdays (unless otherwise indicated) at 3:30 pm in RLM 15.216B
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Not your Parents' M Dwarfs: Probing the Milky Way with its Smallest Constituents (Cancelled due to Hurricane Irene: to be rescheduled) M and (early-type) L dwarfs are the smallest, coolest and least massive stars in the Galaxy. Yet despite their diminutive physical properties, low-mass stars make up ~70% of all of the stars in the Milky Way and have main sequence lifetimes that exceed trillions of years. Their dominance in the Galaxy make M dwarfs excellent tracers of both the structure and evolution of the local Milky Way. In addition, low-mass dwarfs have intense stellar flares and strong magnetic fields that allow us to probe their interiors and may have important consequences for the habitability of planets that orbit them. I will present results from the largest samples of low-mass stars ever assembled. The advent of large surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has yielded photometric and spectroscopic catalogs of more than 100 million and 70,000 stars respectively. Specifically, I will highlight work that has used the unprecedented statistical power of the SDSS to examine the structure and kinematics of low-mass dwarfs in the Milky Way, as well as the nature of their magnetic fields (and subsequent activity) and what this may tell us about the ages of stars. In addition, I will share some resent results from a survey that cataloged some of the widest binaries in the Milky Way and demonstrate how a large sample of M dwarfs has helped us map the three-dimensional distribution of dust in the local Galaxy. Boston University host: Colette Salyk |
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Maxwell, Einstein, and Their Impossibilities Center for Nonlinear Dynamics & Dept. of Physics, University of Texas at Austin hosts: Paul Shapiro & Tanja Rindler-Daller |
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Dark Matter, Dwarf Galaxies, and Massive Failures in the Halo of the Milky Way University of California, Irvine host: TBD |
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Black Hole Scaling Relations University of Michigan host: Karl Gebhardt |
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The Quest for the Dynamical Signature of Close Supermassive Binary Black Holes Pennsylvania State University host: Julie Comerford |
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What is a Galaxy? Haverford College host: TBD |
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No talk scheduled, to avoid conflict with Frank N. Bash Symposium |
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Status update on the James Webb Space Telescope project NASA Goddard Space Flight Center host: TBD |
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GAMA: from Little Blue Fuzzies to Massive Red Monsters and Beyond Swinburne University host: Karl Gebhardt |
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Casting Shadows on the Standard Interstellar Medium Paradigm with GALFA-HI Columbia University host: Sarah Tuttle |
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Beatrice M. Tinsley Visiting Scholar The Origins of Planetary Systems - Constraints from Protoplanetary Disks University of Arizona host: John Lacy |
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No talk scheduled. |
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No talk scheduled. |
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Stellar Forensics with Explosions: Supernovae, Gamma-Ray Bursts, and their Environments New York University, Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics host: Sarah Tuttle |
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HETDEX Special Colloquium Astrophotonics and Space Photonics: A New Era of Instrumentation University of Sydney, School of Physics host: Sarah Tuttle |
Visitors to the Department of Astronomy can find detailed information and maps on our Visiting Austin Page.
Please report omissions/corrections to: G. Orris at argus@astro.as.utexas.edu.
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