Wine and Cheese Fall 2016

This page records the schedule, titles and abstracts of the JHU/STScI CAS Astrophysics Wine & Cheese Series in Fall 2016.

Wine and Cheese sessions with one talk will have a 50 minute talk with 10 minutes for questions. Sessions with two speakers will have two 25 minute talks, each with 5 minutes for questions.

September 19th

Massimo Robberto

GMOX and SAMOS
NSF has recently funded a JHU-led collaboration to build SAMOS, a novel multi-slit spectograph for the 4.1m SOAR telescope in Chile. SAMOS exploits the ground-layer AO system to take hundreds of faint spectra in parallel at R~2000 over a 3’x’3’ field of view. At the same time, Gemini has contracted us with the study of an expanded version of SAMOS, GMOX, to be installed at the Multi-Conjugate extreme-AO system of Gemini South. GMOX covers the full U to K bandpass at R~5000 and can synthetize slits as small as a single HST/WFC3-vis pixel (40mas), reaching unpredentented levels of sensitivity in the near-IR from the ground. I will present the main characteristics of the instruments, their current status, and an outline of the type of science programs that can be carried out in the substantial amount of GTO time.

Bram Ochsendorf

The Location, Clustering, and Propagation of Massive Star Formation in Giant Molecular Clouds
Massive stars are key players in the evolution of galaxies, yet their formation pathway remains unclear. In this talk, I will present results from a project utilizing data from several galaxy-wide surveys to build an unbiased dataset of ∼700 massive young stellar objects (MYSOs), ∼200 giant molecular clouds (GMCs), and ∼100 young (< 10 Myr) optical stellar clusters (SCs) in the Large Magellanic Cloud. We have employed this data to quantitatively study the location and clustering of massive star formation and its relation to the internal structure of GMCs. The main results are as follows: (1) Massive stars do not typically form at the highest column densities nor centers of their parent GMCs. (2) Massive star formation clusters over multiple generations and on size scales much smaller than the size of the parent GMC. (3) The rate of massive star formation is significantly boosted in clouds near SCs. Yet, comparison of molecular clouds associated with SCs with those that are not reveals no significant difference in their global properties. These results reveal a connection between different generations of massive stars on timescales up to 10 Myr. I will compare our findings with Galactic studies and discuss this in terms of GMC collapse, triggered star formation, and a potential dichotomy between low- and high-mass star formation.

September 26th

Speaker Name

Title
Abstract to be added

October 3rd

David Hogg

Chemical tagging of stars with a data-driven model
Abstract to be added

October 10th

Cole Miller

TBD
Abstract to be added

October 24th

Speaker Name

Title
Abstract to be added

October 31st

Special Halloween Speakers

Title
Attendance in costume is optional

November 7th

Anthony Pullen

Revealing Intensity Fluctuations with LSS Tracers
Abstract to be added

November 28th

Aki Roberge

Star-Grazing Exocomets Around Nearby Young Stars and Big Bang to Biosignatures: The LUVOIR Decadal Mission Concept
A double-barreled talk!

December 5th

Speaker Name

Title
Abstract to be added