We’ll be meeting at the regular time and place.  Some interesting reading:

• measuring the mass of an imaged planet (from its star’s proper motion, if you can believe it)
• matter observed falling straight into a black hole (implications for chaotic accretion)
• evidence that the jet did break out in GW170817

Astronomy lunch will meet at the usual time and place.

Some self-help from astrobites:  What does success mean to you?  and the Conference survival guide for students.  Also from them, how about an excuse to look at ALMA images of protoplanetary disks?  It never get old.

Welcome to the new semester.

Come join us to discuss the summer’s astro news.  I’ll have to think back to remember it.  Here are some things that come right to mind.

• neutrinos detected from an AGN
• Can gravitational waves settle the Hubble constant debate?
• strong cosmic censorship disproven?
• the mission to “touch the sun”

Good luck to our students taking oral exams or traveling to the April APS meeting!  (We’ll want a full report next week from those of you attending the meeting.)

No astro seminar this week because of comprehensive exams.  Good luck, graduate students!

Some reading material anyway:

• A chunk of a white dwarf that survived a Type Ia SN?
• new astrobites sister site on physics education research
• an experiment to test if gravity obeys quantum mechanics

This week postdoc Fatemeh Nouri will be visiting from Pune.  Here is her most recent paper:  https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07423

Some other articles:

• a galaxy without dark matter
• trouble for the dark matter cooling scenario

Welcome back from spring break!  We’ll be meeting again at the regular time and place to discuss astronomy and gravitational physics.

Topics:

• RIP Stephen Hawking (by Roger Penrose)
• testing gravity with MESSENGER
• Juno on Jupiter’s jet streams. We also discussed Jupiter’s Red Spot: Here is a nice video explaining why turbulence tends to be confined to 2D in a rotating frame:
  
• INT-JINA Symposium INT-18-72R First multi-messenger observations of a neutron star merger and its implications for nuclear physics. This was a small workshop at the INT in Seattle bringing together LIGO people with nuclear theorists and experimentalists to discuss the resent NSNS merger event GW170817. Talks are available online now via the link.

Please join us at the regular time and place.

We’re on for this week.  Topics of discussion include the stuff we didn’t get a chance to talk about last week (see last week’s post) plus some new additions.

• the magnetic field of a neutron star ultraluminous X-ray source
• at the boundary between big planet and small star
• growing significance of discrepancy between CMB and Hubble constant

No astronomy lunch seminar this week.  However, here are some recommended readings:

• ALMA images AGN donut
• Could BBH gravitational waves have been lensed by intervening galaxies?
• biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres
• Jupiter’s Great Red Spot about to disappear?