Wine and Cheese Spring 2025

This page records the schedule, titles and abstracts of the JHU/STScI CAS Astrophysics Wine & Cheese Series in Spring 2025.

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.

03 February

Cameron Trapp (JHU)

Torques and Radial Flows of Gas in Simulated Milky-Way Mass Galaxies
Observations indicate that a continuous gas supply is needed to maintain observed star formation rates in large, disky galaxies. To fuel star formation, gas must reach the inner regions of such galaxies. Despite its crucial importance for galaxy evolution, how and where gas joins galaxies is poorly constrained observationally and rarely explored in fully cosmological simulations. I will discuss the results of our initial study investigating gas accretion and transport in the FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations for 4 Milky Way mass galaxies. We generally found that gas joins just interior to the disk edge before radially transporting through the disk at average speeds of 1-5 km/s. This corresponds to radial mass fluxes of a few solar masses per year, comparable to the galaxies’ star formation rates. I will also discuss more recent work focused on understanding the angular momentum transfer required for these gas flows, including torques arising from various gravitational and magnetohydrodynamical forces. Finally, I will give a quick introduction to the work I will be doing as a new postdoc here at JHU, working with the FOGGIE simulations.

10 February

George Wong (IAS)

Precision Black Hole Astrophysics in the Era of Event-Horizon-Scale Observation
Black holes are ubiquitous and essential to our understanding of the universe, shaping galaxy evolution, driving magnetized outflows, and providing a natural laboratory for theories of gravity, high-energy plasma physics, and relativistic accretion. Their extreme environments also offer insights into broader astrophysical processes, from planetary accretion disks to pulsar magnetospheres and beyond. Over the past decade, cutting-edge interferometric experiments like the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have produced exquisite, transformative horizon-scale observations. These data provide an unprecedented opportunity to probe relativistic plasma physics, test general relativity in the strong-field regime, and constrain the mechanisms of accretion and jet formation. I will discuss the state-of-the-art in supermassive black hole accretion modeling and highlight how these methods have been applied to EHT data, producing quantitative constraints on near-horizon physics. I will then describe recent advances in identifying robust observational signatures of black hole spin and spacetime geometry from semi-analytic arguments. The next generation of black hole experiments promises to revolutionize our understanding of accretion and jet physics through a combination of space-based interferometry, expanded VLBI arrays, and high-energy multi-wavelength observatories. I will conclude with a discussion of how we will bridge the gap between modeling and observations, paving the way for precision black hole astrophysics in the coming decade.