Understanding galaxy evolution requires understanding star formation and its dependence on the local environment, spanning the scales from individual stars to kpc-size structures. The physical conditions within galaxies determine the formation of stars, star clusters, and larger structures, and their subsequent evolution.
News has reached geologists that mysterious changes are occurring mere kilometers beneath the Earth's surface along convergent Plate Boundaries. Despite its proximity, at subduction travel speeds of only a few centimeters per year, a field trip down a Wadati-Benioff zone to investigate the purported activity takes too long to be practical. So to find out what is happening, ancient rock travelers who have had time to descend and return must be identified and interrogated. This task has be
A Second Space Age is underway, featuring both private and federal space exploration; to facilitate this, nearly all space-access and -exploration technologies need updates and cost-reduction efforts as they derive from archaic concepts and systems of production of the federally-regulated First Space Age (c.1959-2002). I describe the efforts of my team, Pacific Spaceflight (which is not a business) to tackle a basic space-access and space-exploration technol
Neutron stars are composed of the densest observable matter in nature and occupy the intellectual frontier between astrophysics, nuclear physics, and, now, gravitational physics. Current and planned nuclear experiments on heavy nuclei and observations of neutron stars in both electromagnetic and gravitational waves will be exploring the nature of dense matter from complimentary approaches.
Geoscientific knowledge and understanding lies at the heart of many of the most critical societal issues that face us in the 21st century. The pressing human challenges of natural disaster reduction, energy supply and security, and mineral and water resource management, rest on geological foundations. And yet, outside of the academic and industrial geoscience community there is a limited appreciation of Earth Science, especially among policy makers.
The growing deployment of machine learning (ML) systems in medicine, finance, advertising, and even space exploration has raised new, urgent questions about how these systems make their decisions and why. This is especially relevant when ML is used to aid in the discovery of new objects, phenomena, mineralogies, and species. Interpretable ML methods explicitly acknowledge that there is a human involved in the process, and they seek to provide human-understandable reasons for their decisions.&n
Clusters of galaxies are the largest, most massive gravitationally bound objects in the Universe. They are also the most recent of the cosmic objects to form. According to the currently accepted models of cosmic structure formation, the number density distribution of these systems is very sensitive to the parameters describing the large-scale geometry and the expansion history of the universe. For this reason, galaxy clusters are regarded as important cosmological probes.
The spectra of extrasolar objects (both planetary and substellar) offer a window into the physical and chemical processes occurring in their atmospheres. I will discuss what we have learned about the fundamental properties of the atmospheres of brown dwarfs and extra-solar planets derived from powerful atmospheric retrieval techniques. A joint understanding of the chemistry and physics in both brown dwarfs and extra-solar planets is required in order to determine the fundamental differ
Redox reactions — chemical process capable of generating electrical current — are important in Earth and planets, especially at major interfaces where oxidized and reduced phases may be in contact such as the core/mantle boundary in the deep interior, and mineral-fluid interfaces nearer to the surface. In this seminar, I share the results of some of our experimental and theoretical investigations into geochemical signatures of redox reactions.