NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forums |
Organized by: Prof. Lu Lu
Events During the Week of December 7th through December 14th, 2014
Monday, December 8th, 2014
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, December 9th, 2014
- No events scheduled
Wednesday, December 10th, 2014
- No events scheduled
Thursday, December 11th, 2014
- A preview of the Planck 2014 cosmology
- Time: 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
- Place: 4272 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Ben Wandelt, Institut Astrophysique de Paris
- Abstract:
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) carries a cosmic message, preserved through time, written in its anisotropies. The Planck mission is now about to reveal a new chapter of this message using high-resolution nearly all-sky information of the polarization anisotropies for the first time, in addition to upgrading from the nominal mission to the full mission data set. These data provide new insights into several open questions related to the nature of the primordial fluctuations that seeded all structure; the global properties of the universe; neutrinos; dark matter; dark energy; atomic physics; and gravity. - Host: Peter Timbie
Friday, December 12th, 2014
- Variability of TeV gamma-ray blazars
- Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Qi Feng, Purdue University
- Abstract: Blazars belong to a subclass of radio loud AGN with a relativistic jet closely aligned to our line of sight. They are characterized by highly variable non-thermal emission at almost all wavelengths. Similar to gamma-ray bursts, the studies of gamma-ray variability can shed light on gamma-ray emitting regions and production mechanisms in blazars in a relatively model-independent way. With its superior sensitivity, the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) provides us with an opportunity to study rapidly variable gamma-ray emission at TeV energies. In this talk, I will describe the VERITAS experiment and show some recent results from our studies of blazar variability that are based primarily on the VERITAS observations but are interpreted in a multi-wavelength context.
- Host: Vandenbroucke