All meetings and special seminars are on Thursday at 3:30 PM in Dearborn Observatory Room 23. Please contact Fred Rasio if you would like to volunteer to present something or suggest a topic for discussion. We can accommodate any format, from short informal talks on recent research results to journal-club style discussions and special seminars by visitors.

June 3, 2004

This week a number of the theory members will be presenting highlights of recent meeting and presenting their work in advance of their contributions to summer conferences

This is the last theory meeting of the 2003-04 academic year

May 27, 2004

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Dr. Derek Fox (Caltech)
Title: "Early-Time Observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts" [abstract]

May 20, 2004

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Dr. Feng Yuan (Purdue University)
Title: "Luminous hot accretion flows" [abstract]

May 13, 2004

This week Bart Willems will present a talk on his recent work entitled, "Pulsar Kicks and Spin Tilts in Close Double Neutron Stars."

May 6, 2004

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Dr. Kinwah Wu (University College of London)
Title: "Radiative Transfer of Emission Lines from Acrreting Black Holes"

April 29, 2004

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Dr. Luigi Stella (Astronomical Observatory of Rome)
Title: "Disk Accretion Onto Magnetic Neutron Stars: Some Surprises and a New Toy Model" [abstract]

Seminar is to be held at 4:00 PM - NOTE UNUSUAL TIME!

April 22, 2004

Richard O'Shaughnessy will discuss BH-BH and NS-NS merger rates based on his population synthesis calculations in the first part of the meeting.

Natasha Ivanova will follow with a presentation of a recent paper entitled "Ultracompact Binaries as Bright X-Ray Sources in Elliptical Galaxies" [astro-ph/0404234].

April 15, 2004

This week Casey Law will present a talk based on a recent paper entitled, "X-ray Observations of Stellar Clusters Near the Galactic Center." [astro-ph/0404544].

April 8, 2004

Ato Gürkan will present highlights of the IAU Symposium 222 on "The interplay among black holes, stars, and the ISM in galactic nuclei" in the first part of the meeting. Chris Belczynski will follow with a presentation of his recently submitted paper on "First Stellar Binary Black Holes: Strongest Gravitational Wave Burst Sources" [astro-ph/0403361].

April 1, 2004

Our first meeting of the quarter will be held on Thursday, April 1 at 11:00 in Dearborn 23.

The first part of the meeting will be a talk by Josh Faber on a recent paper (astro-ph/0403500) entitled "Accretion dynamics in neutron star black hole binaries."

This will be followed by a talk by Ato Gürkan on highlights of the IAU Symposium 222 on "The interplay among black holes, stars, and the ISM in galactic nuclei".

March 11, 2004

This week Dr. Tomek Bulik from the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw will present an informal talk on "INTEGRAL observations of accreting pulsars".

March 4, 2004

Natasha Ivanova, Bart Willems and Ron Taam will lead a discussion on the evolution of cataclysmic variables as motivated by the recent paper by Andronov and Pinsonneault [astro-ph/0402536].

February 26, 2004

Chris Belczynski, Casey Law, and Ron Taam will lead a discussion on the X-ray sources in the Galactic center.

February 19, 2004

This week Atakan Gürkan will lead a discussion on the disruption of stellar clusters near the Galactic center. This will nicely complement Tuesday's astrophysics seminar presented by Prof. Andrea Ghez of UCLA.

February 12, 2004

This week Dr. Giuseppina Fabbiano from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics will lead a discussion on the X-ray emission from the Antennae and elliptical galaxies.

February 5, 2004

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Dr. Vikram Dwarkadas (University of Chicago)
Title:"The Evolution of Supernovae in the Winds of Massive Stars" [abstract]

January 29, 2004

Theory group members who attended recent conferences will report on what they have learned. In particular, Atakan Gürkan will present some news from the MODEST-4 ( 4th MOdeling DEnse STellar Systems) meeting held in Geneva, Switzerland.

Vicky Kalogera and Ron Taam will present the highlights from IAU Colloquium 194 (on Compact Binaries in the Galaxy and Beyond) held in La Paz, Mexico.

January 22, 2004

This week we will discuss results announced at the Aspen Winter conference on Binary Radio Pulsars, including the new double pulsar system.

January 15, 2004

Josh Faber will be presenting a talk entitled, "Worlds Torn Apart: Planetary disruption for highly eccentric orbits".

This is to be followed by a general discussion on extrasolar planets.

January 8, 2004

Happy New Year!

Our first meeting of the Winter Quarter will be held on Thursday, January 8 at 12:30 pm in Dearborn 23. The first part of the meeting will be organizational followed by talks by Natasha, Chunglee, and Bart on topics that they will be presenting at the Aspen meeting on binary radio pulsars in the following week.

December 11, 2003

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Dr. Asaf Peer (Weizmann Institute of Science)
Title: "GRB prompt emission spectra: Detailed analysis" [abstract]

This talk will be held on Thursday in Dearborn 23 at 12:30.
Note the change in place from the usual room.

December 4, 2003

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Dr. Christopher Deloye (UCSB)
Title: "Realistic Models for the Donors in Ultracompact Low-Mass X-Ray Binaries: The Impact of Donor Composition and Entropy on the Binary's State and Evolution" [abstract]

The talk will be held in Dearborn 23 from 12:00 - 1:15PM.

November 20, 2003

Today's meeting is coordinated by Atakan Gürkan and will consist of several short presentations by students about their research projects.

November 13, 2003

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Prof. Chris Kochanek (Ohio State University )
Title: "Detection of CDM Substructure"

Prof. Stu Shapiro from UIUC will also attend the meeting and may give a short, informal presentation at the end.

Please note that Prof. Shapiro will be giving the department's colloquium on Friday on "Formation of Supermassive Black Holes: Simulations in General Relativity"

November 6, 2003

This week Fred Rasio will speak on "Black Holes in Globular Clusters", based in part on the recent paper by Kalogera, King, & Rasio [astro-ph/0308485].

In addition, Atakan Gürkan will briefly discuss the new paper by Weidner & Kroupa on "Evidence for a fundamental stellar upper mass limit from clustered star formation" [astro-ph/0310860].

October 30, 2003

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Dr. Marc Freitag Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (Heidelberg, Germany)
Title: "Stellar Dynamics for LISA: Stars captured by a massive black hole"

October 23, 2003

Bart Willems give an informal talk on "Wide Binary Millisecond Pulsars"

October 16, 2003

This Thursday Richard O'Shaughnessy will speak on "Detecting Gravitational Waves from Binary Inspiral with LIGO."

October 9, 2003

There will be two presentations today:

Natasha Ivanova will give an informal talk "On the binary fraction in cores of globular clusters" and Ron Taam will lead a discussion about magnetic braking in close binaries.

September 29, 2003

First group meeting of the Fall quarter!

The first part of the meeting will be organizational followed by a:

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Dr. Thomas Maccarone (University of Amsterdam)
Title: "X-Ray Binaries in Elliptical Galaxies and the Globular Cluster Connection"