When:
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Where: 1800 Sherman Avenue, 7th floor, 7-600, Evanston, IL 60201 map it
Contact:
CIERA Astrophysics
(847) 491-8646
CIERA@northwestern.edu
Group: CIERA - CIERA Colloquia
Category: Lectures & Meetings
Description:
TBA
Speaker: Di Li, Tshinghua University
Host: Wen-Fai Fong
CIERA Colloquium: Wanying Kang "Icy ocean worlds -- from the surface to the interior"
When:
Tuesday, November 4, 2025
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Where: 1800 Sherman Avenue, 7th floor, 7-600, Evanston, IL 60201 map it
Contact:
CIERA Astrophysics
(847) 491-8646
CIERA@northwestern.edu
Group: CIERA - CIERA Colloquia
Category: Lectures & Meetings
Description:
Icy moon oceans are promising targets in the search for extraterrestrial life, but characterizing their internal dynamics remains challenging, as most oceanic processes are obscured from direct observation by the overlying ice shell. In contrast, the ice shell itself is relatively accessible to observation and may serve as a window into the ocean below. As the only liquid layer in the system, the subsurface ocean can actively transport heat and momentum, influencing the overlying ice shell in observable ways. Heat transport affects the freezing and melting rates at the ice-ocean interface, potentially leading to measurable variations in ice thickness. Momentum transport can induce non-synchronous rotation of the ice shell relative to the rocky interior. In this talk, I will review how convection, tides, and baroclinic eddies together control oceanic heat and momentum transport. Using Enceladus as an example, we then demonstrate how this understanding can be used to infer the ocean's equation of state and the partitioning of heat production among the ice shell, ocean, and core.
Speaker: Wanying Kang, MIT
Host: Daniel Leconanet
When:
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Where: 1800 Sherman Avenue, 7th floor, 7-600, Evanston, IL 60201 map it
Contact:
CIERA Astrophysics
(847) 491-8646
CIERA@northwestern.edu
Group: CIERA - CIERA Colloquia
Category: Lectures & Meetings
Description:
TBA
Speaker: Rebecca Bernstein, GMTO
Host: Vicky Kalogera
CIERA Colloquium: Phil Hopkins "The Non-Thermal Universe from Black Holes to the Circum and Intergalactic Medium"
When:
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Where: 1800 Sherman Avenue, 7th floor, 7-600, Evanston, IL 60201 map it
Contact:
CIERA Astrophysics
(847) 491-8646
CIERA@northwestern.edu
Group: CIERA - CIERA Colloquia
Category: Lectures & Meetings
Description:
We have known for decades that magnetic fields and relativistic particles (cosmic rays) can play a key role in some astrophysical environments. But it has only recently become possible to model these directly including other key physics (like radiative cooling, self-gravity, star formation, etc.) in models of galaxies and super-massive black hole growth and “feedback.” Moreover those simulations have historically been limited to a very narrow dynamic range of scales being probed. I’ll discuss how a combination of new physics and new numerical methods has led to breakthroughs that now allow us to simulate problems like supermassive black hole growth, star and galaxy formation with truly unprecedented dynamic range reaching from the horizon to the intergalactic medium. These have revealed some major surprises. In particular, non-thermal physics may be vastly more important on both the smallest and largest scales, compared to previous assumptions. I’ll show how these simulations predict qualitatively new forms of strongly-magnetized accretion disks around supermassive black holes, that can resolve many decades-old observational puzzles and make new unique observational predictions. At the same time, the feedback from supernovae and black holes could be, on the largest (circum and intergalactic medium) scales dominated by cosmic rays. I’ll show how recent new observations of X-rays and the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, in particular, appear to be clearly indicating that most of the pressure on these scales is not — as assumed in almost all models for decades — primarily thermal, but appears to be coming from cosmic rays. And I’ll show how new observations can probe this further over a range of galaxy mass scales.
Speaker: Phil Hopkins, Caltech
Host: Claude-André Faucher-Giguére
When:
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Where: 1800 Sherman Avenue, 7th floor, 7-600, Evanston, IL 60201 map it
Contact:
CIERA Astrophysics
(847) 491-8646
CIERA@northwestern.edu
Group: CIERA - CIERA Colloquia
Category: Lectures & Meetings
Description:
TBA
Speaker: Ryan Foley, University of California, Santa Cruz
Host: TBA