Add to Calendar 2025-03-31T16:00:00 2025-03-31T17:00:00 A Pan-STARRS Search for Distant Planets Event Information: Abstract:  I present a search for distant planets in Pan-STARRS1 data. This search has been calibrated by injecting an isotropic control population of synthetic detections into Pan-STARRS1 source catalogs, providing a high-fidelity approximation to injecting synthetic sources at the image level. The search method is sensitive to a wide range of distances, as well as all rates and directions of motion. The search discovered and recovered 692 solar system objects, including 642 TNOs, 23 of which are dwarf planets. By raw number of detections, this is the third most productive Kuiper Belt survey to date, in spite of the fact that distances closer than 80 au were not explicitly searched. Although the search did not find Planet Nine or any other planetary objects, to date, it shows that the remaining parameter space for Planet Nine is highly concentrated in the galactic plane.   A catalog-based approach to characterizing searches will be increasingly important for surveys such as Rubin, Euclid, and Roman, for which injecting synthetic moving sources directly into the images will be even more challenging.   Bio: Matthew Holman is an Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a Lecturer in the Harvard University Department of Astronomy. Holman received an S.B. degree in Mathematics in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences in 1994, both from MIT. After postdoctoral positions at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, he joined the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1997 as a tenure-track civil servant and received tenure in 2001. Holman is credited with the discovery of satellites of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Holman, along with Jack Wisdom, developed an algorithm for the efficient and accurate numerical integration of the orbits in the solar system n-body problem. This is now the framework of nearly every solar system integration package available. Holman, along with Norman Murray, received the 1999 Newcomb Cleveland Award, given annually by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the outstanding refereed publication in Science.   Learn More: Read his faculty wepage from the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Simthsonian here: Matthew Holman | Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian Go through his personal webpage here: Matthew Holman's Home Page Some of his discoveries: "Discovery of Three Irregular Neptunian Moons": Text of Neptunian Press Release "The Irregular Satellites of Saturn": THE SATURNIAN IRREGULARS HOME PAGE "The Uranian Irregulars home page": THE URANIAN IRREGULARS HOME PAGE View his wikipedia page: Matthew J. Holman - Wikipedia About Planet 9: https://www.astronomy.com/science/does-planet-nine-exist/     About Pan-STARRS: https://www2.ifa.hawaii.edu/research/Pan-STARRS.shtml View the Pan-STARR 1 public data page: https://outerspace.stsci.edu/display/PANSTARRS/  Event Location: HENN 318

Add to Calendar 2025-04-07T16:00:00 2025-04-07T05:00:00 Gravitational Waves from the Stellar Graveyard Event Information: Abstract:  The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration has observed hundreds of gravitational-wave sources to date, including mergers between black holes, neutron stars, and mixed neutron star--black holes. These neutron stars and black holes connect many astrophysical puzzles, including the lives and deaths of stars, star cluster dynamics, cosmic chemical enrichment, and the expansion history of the Universe. I will describe some recent astrophysical lessons from gravitational-wave discoveries.   Bio: Maya is an Assistant Professor at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), University of Toronto. She is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist and member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Previously, she was a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at CIERA, Northwestern University, and before that, she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Chicago, where she completed her PhD under the supervision of Daniel Holz. Maya's research includes gravitational-wave astronomy and cosmology, black holes, neutron stars, massive stars, transients, large-scale structure and astrostatistics.   Learn More: About the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration About Gravitational waves About Neutron stars   Resources: See her University of Toronto faculty page here: U of T Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics | Maya Fishbach Directory All A-Z and her personal website here: Maya Fishbach View her presentation: "Listening to Black Holes with Gravitational Waves": Fishbach_KICP20 Watch her videos: Astrophysics and Cosmology with Black Hole Mergers Black hole astrophysics with gravitational-wave catalogs - IPAM at UCLA Physics of Compact Binary Coalescence (2022)   Event Location: HENN 318