Date: Wednesday 05-Feb-97
Speaker: Dr. Jerry Sellwood (Rutgers University)
Title: "The distribution of dark matter in spiral galaxies"
Date: Wednesday 12-Feb-97
Speaker: Dr. Arthur Poland, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Title: "SOHO-SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory: An Overview of Recent Results"
Date: Wednesday 19-Feb-97
Speaker: Prof. Jane Luu (Harvard University)
Title: "Comets and their Origin"
Date: Wednesday 26-Feb-97
Speaker: Prof. Steve Balbus (The University of Virginia)
Title: "Accretion Disk Turbulence for Pedestrians."
Recent developments have rendered amenable to numerical analysis the once mysterious origin of turbulent viscosity in accretion disks. The problem now enjoys a status no less secure but also no less complex than stellar convective turbulence. In this talk, the physics behind accretion disk turbulence will be presented. It will be argued that such turbulence must be magnetically driven, that hydrodynamical mechanisms, cannot, as a matter of principle, produce enhanced local turbulent transport in disks. Several different types of flows will be discussed (shear layers, stellar convection, and disks), and their gross transport properties contrasted. Astrophysical conditions under which the magnitude of the turbulent stress appears to be extremely temperature sensitive will be explored, and their importance to phenomenological disk modeling will be highlighted.
Date: Wednesday 05-Mar-97
Speaker: Dr. Robert Brown (National Radio Astronomy Observatory)
Title: "The NRAO Millimeter Array: Looking to the Future"
Date: Wednesday 12-Mar-97
Speaker: Dr. Richard Mushotzky (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)
Title: "Clusters of Galaxies: A Cosmological Laboratory"
Date: Wednesday 19-Mar-97
Speaker: Dr. Patricia Henning (The University of New Mexico)
Title: "HI Searches for Galaxies in the Zone of Avoidance: Past, Present, and Future"
Date: Wednesday 02-Apr-97
Speaker: Prof. Juhan Frank (Louisiana State University)
Title: "Evolutionary Effects of Irradiation in Close Binaries"
I will discuss the expansion of the companion due to irradiation from the accreting object, the stability of this process, the limit cycles that may occur, how this may affect the evolution of the binary and how we may observe these effects. The talk will be based on a series of papers I've written with Andrew King, Hans Ritter and Uli Kolb (some already published in ApJ, others to appear) and work going on now with my student Patrick McCormick at LSU.
Date: Wednesday 09-Apr-97
Speaker: Prof. Paul Goldsmith (Cornell University/National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center)
Title: "The Arecibo Gregorian Telescope: Technical Perspective and Scientific Prospects"
Date: Wednesday 16-Apr-97
Speaker: Prof. Gerald Cecil (The University of North Carolina)
Title: ``Searching for Shocks in NGC 4258'
Date: Wednesday 23-Apr-97
Speaker: Prof. John Carlstrom (The University of Chicago)
Title: "Interferometric Imaging of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect"
Date: Wednesday 30-Apr-97
Speaker: Dr. Marco Spaans, Johns Hopkins University
Title: "Star Formation at High Redshift"
Date: Wednesday 07-May-97
Speaker: Dr. Gerry Quinlan (Rutgers University)
Title: ``Black Hole Binaries and the Shapes of Galaxies''
