Events

We are living in an astrophysics transformation because decades ago technologists started to design and build our future.

Massive star-forming galaxies and proto-clusters at high redshift, z>2, are thought to be fed by narrow streams of cold, ~10^4K, gas from cosmic web filaments. However, the interaction of these cold streams with the ambient hot CGM is poorly understood. In particular, the observational signatures of this interaction and of cold streams more broadly, the thermal and morphological state of the gas that eventually reaches the central galaxy, and its effect on galaxy evolution, are all open questions.

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity-Mapping Experiment (CHIME) opens a whole new window on the Universe and this new catalogue of more than 500 fast radio bursts (FRBs) provides a treasure trove of data for understaning FRBs. For the first time, we can study a population of FRBs from a single telescope. We see that they come from all over the sky and across the Universe, from very nearby galaxies to more than halfway back to the Big Bang. We also see that there may be more than one type of FRB.

Observational astrophysics is often driven by the desire for ever increasing angular resolution, which has resulted in larger and more expensive telescopes with time. However, telescopes with very small apertures can sometimes perform cosmological measurements as important as their larger siblings. In this talk, I will present several examples of small aperture, space-based experiments providing unique views of the large scale structure of the Universe as traced at optical and infrared wavelengths.

The circumgalactic medium (CGM) represents the boundary between the interstellar medium and the cosmic web, and its properties are directly shaped by the baryon cycle in galaxies. The CGM was traditionally believed to consist mostly of warm and hot gas, but recent breakthroughs have presented a new scenario according to which an important fraction of its mass may reside in an "hidden" cold atomic and molecular phase.

The International System of Units (SI) underwent a revolutionary change on May 20, 2019. In October 2017, the International Committee on Weights and Measures met at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris and recommended a new definition of the SI such that a particular set of constants would have certain values when expressed in the new SI units. In particular, the SI is now defined by the statement:

The International System of Units, the SI, is the system of units in which

A diverse range of physical processes are responsible for regulating star formation across galaxies. Understanding their relative contributions to galaxy growth and quenching at different epochs is one of the key questions in galaxy evolution today. Since the processes driving galaxy growth, quenching and morphological transformations are thought to have characteristic timescales, studying the strength of stochastic star formation rate (SFR) fluctuations on these timescales allows us to disentangle their relative contributions for a population of galaxies.

COVID-19 spreads quickly, with different regions experiencing waves of infections at different times. While the initial waves reflected changes in social behaviour, the most recent waves in Canada and elsewhere were influenced by variants and vaccination. This talk introduces basic epidemic modelling and presents analyses of data from BC and around the world that show how variants and vaccination affected the past and will shape the future of the pandemic.

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"2021 BC Galaxy Summer Seminars" is an online seminar series organized jointly by SFU, UBC and UVic. For the full series schedule, visit the series webpage. Subscribe to our e-mail list here to get reminders about these seminars.

What is the origin of the building blocks of life on early Earth? Is it necessary that they were delivered by meteorites or interplanetary dust? Or was early Earth "biogenic," and could produce key biomolecules on its own? An atmosphere rich in HCN is a distinguishing feature of what we term biogenic worlds. HCN is a key species produced in Miller-Urey electric discharge experiments simulating lightning-based chemistry in the primordial atmosphere. HCN reacts in water to form nucleobases and ribose, the building blocks of RNA, and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.

It is a well-known and indisputable fact that materials age and deform over time, which often leads to detrimental degradation.  In contrast to this view, I will seek to embrace aging and develop it as a methodology to create desired and novel functionality in matter. The central idea is that a material retains a memory of the external stimuli to which it was exposed during its preparation history and, in reaction to those applied cues, can be directed to evolve desired behaviors not easily found otherwise.

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"2021 BC Galaxy Summer Seminars" is an online seminar series organized jointly by SFU, UBC and UVic. For the full series schedule, visit the series webpage. Subscribe to our e-mail list here to get reminders about these seminars.