Michigan Astronomy
Michigan Astronomy

eXtreme astrophysics

Extreme astrophysics meetings focus on diverse aspects of phenomena related to deep gravitational potentials: compact objects, high-energy, galaxy clusters.

We meet every friday at noon (Michigan time)in the Owl room , 845 Dennison Building. At each meeting a participant reviews a paper from the literature (please send the reference a few days in advance to extremeastrophysics "at" umich.edu), or presents some aspects of his/her own research, to find out what we're all working on and keep updated. We aim at keeping the meetings totally informal, with the idea of discussing topics in an accessible way, at the level a first-year graduate student would understand. Presentations should not look like conference talks, they should focus on the physics involved and the methods used, in a sort of teaching style. Whiteboard presentations are absolutely welcome, better than fancy powerpoint! We'll be talking informally about our everyday research, so it should be a fairly easy preparation. The goal is to have a combination of discussion, hopefully involving a few people, rather than the weekly presenter carry all the weight of the meeting. So, each of us should volunteer (or be volunteered) for a friday presentation, with the choice of:

  • presenting a paper from literature and stimulate discussion (please send the reference a few days in advance)
  • presenting some aspect of your work in a teaching style
  • presenting a problem that you'd like to explain and then get help with
  • presenting a recent result that you are particularly excited about
External speakers are mostly welcome, and we should encourage them to follow the same guidelines of simplicity and informality.

Schedule for '07-'08

Winter

Friday Jan 12   Bring a plot
Friday Jan 18    Discussion
Friday Jan 25   Heather Swan
Friday Feb 1   Fang Yuan
Friday Feb 8   Discussion
Friday Feb 15   Bring a plot
Friday Feb 22   Massimo Dotti
Friday Mar 7   Oleg Gnedin
Friday Mar 14   Bring a plot
Friday Mar 21   Monica Valluri
Friday Mar 28   Jen Blum
Friday Apr 4   Shannon Schmoll
Friday Apr 11 TBD
Friday Apr 18 TBD