All seminars are held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:00 pm in Room 502 College of Arts and Sciences, 725 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA. Light Refreshments are served at 3:30pm in room CAS 500. Call (617) 358-0603, or email Kimberly Paci (kpaci at bu.edu), for further information.

Below is a partial list of upcoming seminars for the Fall 2008 semester. Please check back for the additions to our list of guest speakers and for talk titles.

Astrophysics Colloquia – Spring Semester 2009

Date Speaker Topic
Tuesday Jan. 20 Warren Brown, CfA Hypervelocity Stars and Massive Black Holes
Tuesday Jan. 27 Dan Clemens, IAR GPIPS and other fun with the Perkins Telescope
Tuesday Feb. 3 No Seminar
Tuesday Feb. 10 Andrew West, MIT From Foreground Trash to Bountiful Treasure: Galactic Stratigraphy, Magnetic Activity and the Kinematics of M dwarfs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Tuesday Feb. 17 Nathan Smith, UC Berkeley Monday Schedule but we are still having seminar at 4pm. Eruptive Mass Loss in Massive Stars and Precursors to the Most Luminous Supernova Explosions
Monday Feb. 23 Riccardo Schiavon,Gemini The History of Star Formation of Early-Type Galaxies
Tuesday Feb. 24 Stella Kafka, CalTech Magnetic Activity on CV Secondaries: Nature or Nurture?
Tuesday Mar. 3 No Seminar
Friday Mar. 6 Peter Frinchaboy, University of Wisconsin Stellar Tracers: Probing Physics and Galactic Structure
Tuesday Mar. 17 Cornelia Lang, University of Iowa The Galactic Center
Tuesday Mar. 24 Ed Berschinger, MIT Dark Energy or Modified Gravity?
Tuesday Mar. 31 Peter Barnes, University of Florida The CHAMPS Mopra Molecular Line Survey
Tuesday Apr. 7 Peter Schloerb, University of Massachusetts LMT
Tuesday Apr. 14 Gregor Tucker, Brown University BLAST
Tuesday Apr. 21 Richard French, Wellesley University Saturn or Pluto
Tuesday Apr. 28 Evan Skillman, University of Minnesota The Recent Star Formation Histories of Nearby Galaxies


PAST ASTROPHYSICS COLLOQUIA
Fall Semester 2008
Date Speaker Topic
Tuesday Sept. 9 Alan Marscher, BU/IAR Probing Deeply Into the Inner Jets of Blazars
Tuesday Sept. 16 No Colloquium
Tuesday Sept. 23 Soren Meibom, Center for Astrophysics The Rotational Evolution of Low-Mass Stars
Tuesday Sept. 30 No Colloquium
Tuesday Oct. 7 Max Tegmark, MIT New Clues About Inflation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy
Tuesday Oct. 14 No Colloquium
Tuesday Oct. 21 Lisa Prato, Lowell Observatory Young Planets in Visible and Infrared Light: Spots' Tricks
Tuesday Oct. 28 Jason Wright, Cornell University TBA
Tuesday Nov. 4 Elliot Horch, Southern Connecticut State University Fainter and Closer: New High-Resolution Imaging Capabilities at the WIYN Telescope
Tuesday Nov. 18 Dava Sobel, Author Joint IAR/CSP Seminar: The Drama of Copernicus: How He Was Convinced to Publish his Crazy Idea
Tuesday Nov. 25 Gerritt Verschuur, University of Memphis Intermediate and High-Velocity "Clouds" A New Look at an Old Problem
Tuesday Dec. 2 Ellen Zweibel, University of Wisconsin The Origin and Evolution of Astrophysical Magnetic Fields
Tuesday Dec. 9 Tim Beers, Michigan State University SEGUE-1, SEGUE-2, and the Future of Large Scale Surveys of the Galaxy
Spring Semester 2008
Date Speaker Topic
Tuesday Jan. 29 Michael Meyer, University of Arizona Two Tails of a Distribution Function: The Initial Mass Functions of Extreme Star Formation
Tuesday Feb. 5 Paul Ho, Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taipei Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA From the SMA to ALMA
Tuesday Feb. 12 Paul Green, University of Arizona Factory Trawling the X-ray Sky: The Chandra Multiwavelength Project (ChaMP)
Tuesday Feb. 26 Steve Longmore, Harvard-Smithsonian CfA The Evolutionary Sequence of Protostellar Cores
Tuesday Mar. 18 Sara Seager, MIT Exoplanets: Interiors, Atmospheres, and the Search for Habitable Worlds
Tuesday April 1 James Slavin, NASA/GSFC MESSENGER Mission
Tuesday April 8 Hans Zinnecker, Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam (AIP) Do all (massive) stars form in clusters?
Tuesday April 15 Ned Wright, UCLA IR Cosmology
Tuesday April 22 Robert Mathieu, University of Wisconsin Open Clusters: Open Windows on Stellar Dynamics
Tuesday April 29 Julio Navarro, University of Massachusetts Dark Matter
Tuesday May 6 Bruno Guidordoni, Science and Religion
Fall Semester 2007
Date Speaker Topic
Tuesday Sept. 18 Jay Lockman, NRAO The ongoing formation of the Milky Way: High Velocity clouds plunging into the Galaxy
Tuesday Sept. 25 Alberto Bolatto, University of Maryland The Primitive Universe, Near and Far
Tuesday Oct. 2 Giles Novak, Northwestern University The Galactic Magnetic Field and its Role in Star Formation
Tuesday Oct. 9 No Seminar Monday schedule for classes
Tuesday Oct. 16 Kelsey Johnson, University of Virginia Are Super Star Clusters Actually Super?
Tuesday Oct. 23 Irena Stojimirovic, BU/IAR Parsec-scale Outflows from Low-Mass YSOs
Tuesday Oct. 30 James Jackson, BU/IAR Infrared Dark Clouds: The Birth of Star Clusters
Tuesday Nov. 6 Amalia Hicks, University of Virginia Missing Baryons: Recent Results from X-ray Observations of High-Redshift Clusters
Tuesday Nov. 13 Ian Dell'Antonio, Brown University Lensing/Dark Matter
Tuesday Nov. 20 Keivan Stassun, Vanderbilt University A Synthesis of Fundamental Issues in the Formation and Early Evolution of Low Mass Stars and Brown Dwarfs
Tuesday Nov. 27 Daniela Calzetti, University of Massachusetts Star Formation in the Mid-Infrared, and implications for the high redshift Universe
Tuesday Dec. 4 Josh Winn, MIT The Transits of Exoplanets
Tuesday Dec. 11 TBD TBA
Spring Semester 2007
Date Speaker Topic
Tuesday Jan 23 Justin Kasper, MIT Breaking the Ionospheric Barrier: The Mileura Wide-field Array and the Return of Low Frequency Radio Astronomy
Tuesday Jan 30 Elizabeth Blanton, Boston University IAR Radio Sources in Clusters of Galaxies: Impact on the ICM and Probes of High-z Systems
Tuesday Feb 6 Karl Gordon, University of Arizona Spitzer Observations of the Aromatic Features: New Insights from Spectroscopy and Imaging
Tuesday Feb 13 Adam Burgasser, MIT Substellar Noir: Brown Dwarf Binaries and the Mystery of the L/T Transition
Tuesday Feb 20 Monday Class Schedule, No Seminar
Tuesday Feb 27 Bob Rood, University of Virginia The Nature of Technological Civilizations: How to Search for Unicorns
Tuesday Mar 6 Bob Benjamin, University of Wisconsin at Whitewater Infrared Galactic Cartography: Constraints on the Stellar Disk, Bar, and Spiral Arms
Tuesday Mar 13 No Seminar (Spring Break)
Tuesday Mar 20 Geoffrey Landis, NASA Glenn Research Center Three Years on Mars: the Mars Exploration Rovers Mission
Tuesday Mar 27 David Helfand, Columbia University MAGPIS: Finding Magnetars, Dark Accelerators, and Other Shiny Trinkets in a Galactic Plane Radio Survey
Tuesday Apr 3 Brian Chaboyer, Dartmouth College The Space Interferometry Mission: Parallaxes, Planets & More
Tuesday Apr 10 Kevin Marvel, Executive Officer, American Astronomical Society Astronomy and the FY 2008 Budget
Wednesday Apr 11 Martin J. Rees, Cambridge University Scanning Cosmological Horizons
Tuesday Apr 17 David Charbonneau, Center for Astrophysics The Era of Comparative Exoplanetology
Monday Apr 23 Jim Heasley, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii The Pan-STARRS Project
Tuesday Apr 24 Steve Snowden, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center The diffuse X-ray background: from Earth's exosphere to the edge of the Universe
Tuesday May 1 Maxim Markevitch, Center for Astrophysics Novel methods of measuring some interesting properties of intergalactic gas in clusters


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