Add to Calendar 2026-11-16T16:00:00 2026-11-16T17:00:00 ASTRO Colloquium with Ronan Kerr Event Information: Title: Unearthing the Stellar Fossil Record of our Evolving Galaxy Abstract: Star formation sculpts the universe around us, producing countless stellar systems while driving radiative feedback that influences the future evolution of star-forming gas structures on scales from clouds to spiral arms. It has long been difficult to study star formation on timescales longer than a few million years, as gas disperses soon after stars form, but recent surveys like the Gaia mission provide a new resource that can trace star formation on far longer timescales: the stellar fossil record.  When stars form, they retain the velocities of their natal clouds, so by computing their positions, velocities, and ages, we can trace stellar populations back through their orbits and reconstruct their formation sites upwards of 50 Myr before present. In this talk, I will present the rapidly expanding body of discoveries that have been made using the stellar fossil record, from uncovering the fingerprint of star formation driven by expanding gas in a supernova-driven shell, to signatures of cloud collisions, to emerging galactic-scale structures. Through future data releases from Gaia, Rubin, Roman and spectroscopic surveys like SDSS and 4MOST, our stellar fossil record will only expand in the coming years, providing an unprecedented view of the patterns and structures that sculpt star formation in our evolving galaxy.  Bio: Dr. Ronan Kerr is a Canadian astrophysicist known for his research on star formation, stellar populations and the early evolution of stellar and planetary systems. He is currently a Dunlap Fellow at the University of Toronto and has a PhD from the University of Texas in Austin. His work often utilizes data from the Gaia spacecraft to study young stars and their associations, aiming to understand the processes that govern star formation in our galaxy. Learn More: See his personal website here: https://www.rkerrastro.com/  Watch him on Youtube, "Revealing the processes guiding galactic star formation using young stellar populations" Event Location: HENN 318

Add to Calendar 2026-11-23T16:00:00 2026-11-23T17:00:00 ASTRO Colloquium with Renee Hložek Event Information: Abstract: [coming soon!] Bio: Prof. Renee Hložek is an Assistant Professor of Astrophysics at the Dunlap Institute in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto in Canada. She is a member of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope collaboration and the Simons Observatory, which study the cosmic microwave background (or CMB) at a very sharp angular resolution to unlock the secrets of the early universe and the period of star formation. She uses this data to answer questions about the structure of the universe, its initial conditions and its eventual fate using data. Hložek hails from South Africa, where she studied at the University of Pretoria and the University of Cape Town. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2011, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She was a Lyman Spitzer Jr. Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Astrophysics at Princeton University and the Spitzer-Cotsen Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows. She is also a TED Fellow.  Learn More: See her faculty bio from the University of Toronto: https://www.astro.utoronto.ca/people/faculty/name/renee-hlozek/  Read more about her from her Rhodes Project boi: https://rhodesproject.com/renee-hlozek-profile  See her video from Story Collider, "The Universe doesn't care about you": https://www.storycollider.org/singles/2020/9/23/renee-hlozek-the-universe-doesnt-care-about-you      Event Location: HENN 318

Add to Calendar 2027-03-01T16:00:00 2027-03-01T17:00:00 Department Colloquium with Pratika Dayal Event Information: Title: [coming soon!] Abstract: [coming soon!] Bio: Pratika Dayal is a professor at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. After receiving her PhD from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA, Trieste, Italy), Dayal was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics (Potsdam, Germany), the Institute for Astronomy (Edinburgh, U.K.) and the Institute for Computational Astronomy (Durham, U.K.). She then spent a decade as a faculty member at the Kapteyn Institute at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) before joining the University of Toronto. Her research spans understanding galaxies and their black holes through 13.8 billion years of cosmic time, their impact on the universe, and shedding light on the nature of dark matter.Professor Dayal’s research group has been supported by several international grants including a starting grant awarded by the European Research Council (ERC; 2016), a mid-career VIDI grant awarded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO, 2017) and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) discover grant (2025). For her work, she has also been awarded a Young Scientist medal (2017) by the International Union of Pure & Applied Physics. Dayal has advised more than 30 students over all career stages and is a core member of international cutting-edge astronomical research facilities including the James Webb Space Telescope, Euclid, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Firmly committed to fostering equity, diversity and inclusivity in academia, she has undertaken grassroots initiatives which include visiting high schools, giving lectures to student societies at all levels and being a tutor for undergraduate students to help them find the right study trajectory. Dayal also regularly gives outreach lectures and has collaborated with Stereoptik, a company comprising visual artists and musicians, to create a show about the history of the universe, called Stellaire. Learn More: See her faculty profile from the University of Toronto: https://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/about/glance/new-faculty/2025-26/pratika-dayal  See her personal website: https://pratika24.wixsite.com/pratika-dayal  From the CITA website, watch video, "The emergence of galaxies in the first billion years": https://www.cita.utoronto.ca/items/emergence-galaxies-first-billion-years/    Event Location: HENN 318