Wine and Cheese Spring 2026

This page records the schedule, titles and abstracts of the JHU/STScI CAS Astrophysics Wine & Cheese Series in Spring 2026.

Wine and Cheese sessions with one speaker 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.

26 January

Colin Hamill (AAS)

Astronomy on the Hill: Federal Funding and Dark & Quiet Skies Policy
The landscape of federal science policy has shifted dramatically over the past year. As the FY2026 federal funding cycle concludes, this talk will provide a brief overview of the current fiscal situation for the astronomical sciences, as well as an outlook for FY2027 and beyond. We will then examine the Dark & Quiet Skies initiative, a global effort to preserve the night sky from light pollution and radio frequency interference from satellites. We will review recent regulatory developments in the space environment and highlight how the astronomical community works with commercial space operators and the federal government to ensure a sustainable orbital environment. The talk concludes with a discussion of how scientists at all career stages can engage with policymakers to ensure astronomy and science remains a priority on Capitol Hill.

09 February

Chris Nagele (JHU)

Radiation Transfer Simulations of Black Hole Spectra
Spectra from accreting black holes are one of our most powerful tools for understanding these enigmatic objects. These spectra, however, are not well understood. For example, stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes exhibit different spectral properties, with the stellar mass black holes changing between different spectral states (hard and soft states) while the supermassive black holes have more uniform spectral slopes. We run radiation transfer post-processing of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamical simulations of black hole accretion, in order to generate spectral predictions. We use two radiation transfer codes, Pandurata and PTransX, to solve for thermal balance and ionization balance in different parts of the simulation. Our spectra are remarkably similar to observed trends, with a clear hard/soft dependence on accretion rate at M = 10 Msun and uniformly flat spectra in the supermassive regime. We also compute high resolution spectra in order to simulate emission lines coming from the accretion disk near the black hole. Our spectra contain Fe Kalpha lines with equivalent widths (50-200 eV) and line shapes consistent with observations. We find, however, that the breadth of these lines is due to several factors, and not simply to extreme relativistic motions near the black hole, as is almost always assumed. We discuss how physical quantities from our simulations can be incorporated into models which perform black hole parameter inference, thereby breaking some of the degeneracy associated with these models.

Stephen Schmidt (JHU)

Hot Jupiters are Inflated Primarily by Shallow Heating
The unexpectedly large radii of transiting hot Jupiters have led to many proposals for the physical mechanisms responsible for heating their interiors. While it has been shown that hot Jupiters reinflate as their host stars brighten due to heating deep in planetary interiors, young hot Jupiters also exhibit signs of delayed cooling possibly related to heating closer to their surfaces. To investigate this tension, we enhance our previously published hot Jupiter thermal evolution model by adding a parameter that allows for both deep heating and delayed cooling. We fit our thermal evolution models to a homogeneous, physically self-consistent catalog of accurate and precise hot Jupiter system properties in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. We find that hot Jupiters' interior cooling rates are reduced on average by 95%--98% compared to simpler anomalous heating models. The most plausible explanation for this inference is substantial shallow heating just below their radiative--convective boundaries that enables reinflation with much less deep heating. Shallow heating by Ohmic dissipation and/or temperature advection are therefore important components of accurate models of hot Jupiter atmospheres, especially in circulation models. If hot Jupiters are inflated primarily by shallow heating as we propose, then we predict that their observed phase curve offsets should increase with temperature in the range T_eq <~ 1500 K, peak in the range 1500 K <~ T_eq <~ 1800 K, and decrease in the range T_eq >~ 1800 K.

16 February

Jessica A. Gaskin (GSFC)

Preparing for the Next Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey (Astro2030)
The Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, conducted once every ten years, establishes the community’s highest-priority ground- and space-based science goals and provides strategic guidance for future investments. NASA relies heavily on this guidance when shaping its long-term mission portfolio and budget. For the 2020 Decadal Survey, NASA supported a suite of community-led mission concept studies that articulated compelling science cases, assessed technical readiness, defined design reference missions, and developed high-level cost estimates, ensuring that the Decadal Committee was equipped with a robust and well-informed basis for its deliberations. As preparations begin for the next survey, Astro2030, NASA is again engaging the community to inform its planning. This includes soliciting broad feedback and convening two workshops—one in the spring and one in the fall of this year—to incorporate the evolving space environment, emerging technologies, and growing commercial capabilities before initiating any new NASA-sponsored mission concept formulation activities. This talk will provide an overview of the Decadal Survey process and outline NASA’s current plans and rough timeline for preparing for Astro2030.

23 February

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02 March

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09 March

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23 March

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30 March

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06 April

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13 April

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20 April

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27 April

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04 May

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