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.

May 11, 2006

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Prof. Yanquin Wu (University of Toronto)
Title: "Debris Disks: Gas-Dust and Dust-Planet Interactions"

John Fregeau will give a 30-min practice talk right before at 3:30pm.

May 4, 2006

This week group meeting is cancell due to the Special Astrophysics Seminar: Dr. Bob Millis (Director, Lowell Observatory) will be giving a special astro seminar on "The Discovery Channel Telescope and its Application to Exploration of the Kuiper Belt" this Thursday (May 4) at 4 PM in Dearborn.

April 27, 2006

Craig Heinke will summarize a recent ULX paper: Kaaret, Simet & Lang, "A 62 Day X-ray Periodicity and an X-ray Flare from the Ultraluminous X-ray Source in M82" [astro-ph/0604029].

Jeremy Sepinsky will talk about his recently submitted paper: "Interacting Binaries with Eccentric Orbits. I Secular Orbital Evolution due to Conservative Mass Transfer".

April 20, 2006

This week Gerry Brown will lead a discussion on binaries with compact objects. Please join us and participate!

April 13, 2006

This meeting is cancelled.

April 6, 2006

Bart Willems will tell us about his work on circumbinary disks. Chunglee Kim will tell us about a meeting on SKA she attended last week.

March 30, 2006

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Re'em Sari (Caltech)
Title: "Physics of fireballs: Gamma Ray Bursts & Soft Gamma Ray Repeaters"
Seminar will be held on Thursday at 4:00 PM

March 16, 2006

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Monica Valluri (University of Chicago)
Title: "Probing the low end of the Supermassive Black hole mass function with Local Group galaxy NGC 205"

March 9, 2006

The group meeting today is *cancelled* (speaker couldn't make it).

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Yanqin Wu (University of Toronto)
Title: "Debris Disks: gas-dust and dust-planet interactions" [abstract]

March 2, 2006

Chunglee Kim will tell us about the discovery of a new class of radio pulsars named RRATs ... see: "Transient radio bursts from rotating neutron stars" McLaughlin et al. [astro-ph/0511587]

John Fregeau will tell us about his recently submitted work on binary IMBH formation: "Massive Black Hole Binaries from Collisional Runaways. [astro-ph/0512642]

February 23, 2006

Group meeting cancelled.

February 16, 2006

Special Theoretical Astrophyiscs Seminar
Dr. Kayhan Gultekin (University of Maryland)
Title: "Growing Intermediate-Mass Black Holes with Gravitational Waves" [abstract]

February 9, 2006

This week we will have another round of these informal discussions of ongoing projects.

February 2, 2006

Our group meeting today will be an informal forum for the grad students to get a chance to chat about their work; particularly, to discuss any current results and/or difficulties.

January 26, 2006

Special Theoretical Astrophyiscs Seminar
Dr. Michela Mapelli (SISSA, Italy)
Title: "Dynamical Constraints on Intermediate Mass Black Holes"

January 12, 2006

Special Theoretical Astrophyiscs Seminar
Tamara Bogdanovic
Title: "Observational Signatures of Massive Black Holes"

January 10, 2006

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Stratos Boutloukos
Title: "Neutron Star Oscillations as Sources of Gravitational Waves" [abstract]

Seminar is to be held on Tuesday at 4:00 PM - NOTE UNUSUAL DAY and TIME!

January 5, 2006

Happy New Year!

Our first meeting of the Winter Quarter will be held on Thursday, January 5 at 3:30 pm in Dearborn seminar room.

Richard O'Shaughnessy has kindly volunteered to organize a presentation of recent astro research news.

Please contact Richard if you have a news item you'd like to present or discuss. A prize will be given to anyone who can guess correctly the top news item that will come out of the AAS meeting next week...

November 17, 2005

At this week's group meeting:

Richard O'Shaughnessy will talk about the ApJ Letter on "Gravitational Radiation from Newborn Magnetars" by Luigi Stella, Simone Dall'Osso, GianLuca Israel, & Alberto Vecchio [astro-ph/0511068].

This will also serve as a nice introduction for the astrophysics seminar to be given next week (Tuesday Oct 24) by Vicky Kaspi (on magnetars).

Fred Rasio will present a summary of recent detections and localizations of short-hard GRBs with Swift and HETE (see the special Oct 6 issue of Nature).

November 10, 2005

We will not have a theoretical astrophysics group meeting this week.

This is to allow everyone to attend the special condensed matter seminar to be given by Prof. L. Wang of the Max Planck Research Group on Optics, Information and Photonics at the University of Nuremberg, on "PRECISION MEASUREMENT OF GRAVITY, SPACE AND TIME".

This seminar will take place on Thursday at 4 PM in Tech F235.

November 3, 2005

We will have two short presentations this week based on recent preprints:

Sourav Chatterjee on "Planets in triple star systems -- the case of HD 188753" by Simon Portegies Zwart and Steve McMillan [astro-ph/050976].

John Fregeau on "Three-Body Dynamics with Gravitational Wave Emission" by Kayhan Gultekin, Cole Miller, and Doug Hamilton [astro-ph/0509885].

October 27, 2005

This week two grad students will discuss recent preprints related to their research:

Manou Rantsiou will talk about "Mergers of neutron star - black hole binaries with small mass ratios: nucleosynthesis, gamma-ray bursts and electromagnetic transients" by Stefan Rosswog (to appear in ApJ) [astro-ph/0508138].

Casey Law will present "Stars form by gravitational collapse, not competitive accretion" by Mark Krumholz, Chris McKee & Richard Klein (to appear in Nature) [astro-ph/0510412].

October 20, 2005

This week we will have two journal club presentations:

Richard O'Shaughnessy on "The Age Distribution of Massive Star Clusters in the Antennae Galaxies" by Fall, Chandar, & Whitmore [astro-ph/0509293].

Bart Willems on "Getting Its Kicks: A VLBA Parallax for the Hyperfast Pulsar B1508+55" by Chatterjee et al. [astro-ph/0509031].

October 13, 2005

Special Theoretical Astrophysics Seminar
Josh Winn (Harvard CfA)
Title: "Spin-Orbit Alignment in the Transiting Planetary System HD 209458"

Josh Winn is also giving the Physics and Astronomy colloquium on "The Case of the Mysterious Winking Star" Friday at 4 PM in Tech L211.

October 6, 2005

There is no theory group meeting this week as the department's welcoming party for new graduate students is held on this Thursday in Tech F235 from 3-5 PM.

September 29, 2005

This week three of our members will speak.

Chris Deloye will present the highlights of a workshop on AM CVn Systems

Bart Willems will give a summary of the meeting on Active OB Stars - Laboratories for Stellar and Circumstellar Physics

David Lin will discuss a recent preprint by Kuhlen, Woosley, & Glatzmaier on "Carbon Ignition in Type Ia Supernovae: II. A Three Dimensional Numerical Model" [astro-ph/0509367].

September 22, 2005

This is the first group meeting of the 2005-2006 academic year!

Craig Heinke and Natasha Ivanova will present highlights from the conference on "A life with Stars" in Amsterdam last month honoring Ed van den Heuvel.

Chunglee Kim will discuss the new paper by David Nice et al. on "A 2.1 Solar Mass Pulsar Measured by Relativistic Orbital Decay" [astro-ph/0508050].