Session W7: Astrophysics

Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award Talk: Formation and Evolution of Compact Objects in Binary Systems

Ever since their discovery, first as X-ray sources and later as radio pulsars, binary stellar systems harboring neutron stars or black holes have been pivotal in our efforts to understand the formation and evolution of these most compact objects and the implications for gravitational wave searches. I will review some recent surprising results linking the formation of neutron stars and black holes. I will also discuss how studies of double compact objects can help uncover the origin of short gamma-ray bursts and assess the prospects for gravitational wave detections in the near future.   

LeRoy Apker Award Talk: The Velocity Structure of Galaxy Clusters

The phase space distribution of galaxies in and around galaxy clusters encodes fundamental information about cluster formation, mass, and structure. Using the maxBCG cluster catalog, produced from imaging data in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we study the BCG-galaxy velocity correlation function. By understanding its non-Gaussianity, we model the distribution of velocity dispersion at fixed richness and compute the velocity dispersion function. Like the cluster mass function, the velocity dispersion function can be used to understand cosmology and structure formation. Additionally we measure the segregation of galaxies in velocity space as a function of various observable properties.   

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Recent technological advances have made it possible to carry out deep optical surveys of a large fraction of the visible sky. Such surveys enable a diverse array of astronomical investigations including: the search for small moving objects in the solar system, studies of the assembly history of the Milky Way, and the establishment of tight constraints on models of dark energy using a variety of independent techniques. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is the most ambitious project of this kind that has yet been proposed. With an 8.4 m primary mirror, and its 3.2 Gigapixel, 10 square degree camera, LSST will provide a nearly an order of magnitude improvement in survey speed over all existing surveys, or those which are currently in development. Over its ten years of operation, LSST will survey 20,000 square degrees of the sky in six optical colors down to 27th magnitude. At least a thousand distinct images will be acquired of every field, enabling a plethora of statistical investigations for intrinsic variability and for control of systematic uncertainties in deep imaging studies. In this talk some of the science that will be made possible by the construction of LSST and a brief overview of the technical design will be given.