// Enter speaker information here. The format is:
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// ["Date","Name","Affiliation","Title","Abstract","Day","Time"]
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// ** Edited to add color change for special day/time.
// ** If Day or Time field is not empty, special day/time
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//January[0]=["18","","","","","",""];
//January[0]=["25","","","OPEN","","",""];
February[0]=["1","Bill Jones","Princeton","Cosmology and Astrophysics in the Planck Era","","",""];
February[1]=["8","Tom Abel","Stanford","Astrophysics of Supermassive Black Hole Formation","","",""]; 
February[2]=["15","Alison Coil","UCSD","The Morphologies and Outflow Kinematics of Star Formation Quenching","Since z=1 the number of quiescent, non-star forming galaxies in the Universe has roughly doubled.  In order to constrain the star formation quenching mechanism,  I will present results on the clustering properties, morphologies, and feedback associated with outflowing winds in galaxies at z~0.7 that are having their star formation quenched.  I will also briefly present a new survey called PRIMUS, the largest faint galaxy redshift survey taken to date.","",""];
February[3]=["22","Steven Weinberg","UTexas Austin","Some Field Theory Problems in Cosmology","","",""];
March[0]=["1","Peter Goldreich","Caltech/IAS","Sizes and Shapes of Drops Created In High Speed Impacts","High speed impacts of large bodies on Earth launch ejecta on trajectories that transport them thousands of kilometers from the impact site. These events are recorded in discrete layers of sub-millimeter size spherules in sea floor sediments. Larger, rarer, and interestingly shaped objects are found on land. I will describe the physical processes that occur in energetic impacts. Emphasis will be given to the mechanisms that determine the sizes and shapes of the ejecta and the cooling of the fireball.  An analogy will be drawn with processes that occur in the expanding universe. A possible relation to the origin of chondrules will be explored.","",""];
March[1]=["8","Dong Lai","Cornell","Magnetic Star - Disk Interactions and Spin-Orbit Misalignment in Exoplanetary Systems","Recent observations have shown that in many exoplanetary systems, the spin axis of the parent star is misaligned with the angular momentum axis of the planet's orbit. This is unexpected as planets are formed in protostellar disks which are thought to be perpendicular to the stellar rotation axis. Surprisingly, the interaction between a magnetic protostar and its circumstellar disk gives rise to a secular instability, which may result in spin-orbit misalignment following planet formation, even before any additional few-body gravitational interaction takes place.","",""];
March[2]=["15","Renyue Cen","Princeton","The Nature of Damped Lyman Alpha Systems","","",""];
March[3]=["22","Nir Shaviv","Hebrew Univ.","20th Century Global Warming - Anthropogenic or Solar?","The 20th Century has seen a notable temperature rise, generally attributed to the greenhouse effect of anthropogenic gases, and a future \"business as usual\" policy is generally believed to be catastrophic. I will show, however, that the story is not that simple. I will address the following questions,all of which have a far from trivial and often surprising answer: How large is the greenhouse effect? Could some of the temperature rise be natural and not anthropogenic? If so, what is this natural driver? How sensitive really is Earth\'s climate? What should we expect in the future? How effective will the implementation of a cap and trade agreement be?","",""];
March[4]=["29","Lawrence Krauss","Arizona State","Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Phase Transitions","","",""];
April[0]=["5","Mary Putman","Columbia","Galaxy Gas Flows","Many galaxies exhibit the need for a continual source of star formation fuel.  Halo gas is a common feature of these galaxies, though utilizing this gas as fuel may require the gas to go through multiple phases.  I will discuss new observations and simulations that investigate galaxy gas flows to determine how baryons get into galaxies and metals are mixed throughout their gaseous disks.  I will also discuss a population of newly discovered cold clouds that may represent a combination of cooling disk gas, new dwarf galaxies, and stellar feedback.","",""];
April[1]=["12","Lars Hernquist","Harvard","Collective Origin of Spiral Structure in Disk Galaxies","","",""];
April[2]=["19","Lars Bildsten","KITP","Diverse Energy Sources for Supernovae","The theoretical community is beginning to appreciate (and predict) the potential diversity of explosive outcomes from stellar evolution while the supernovae surveys are finding new kinds of supernovae. I will speak about two such new supernovae. The first are ultraluminous core collapse supernovae with radiated energies approaching 10^51 ergs. I will present our recent work that explains these events with late-time energy deposition from rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars: magnetars. I will close with our theoretical work on helium shell detonations on accreting white dwarfs that predict a new class of supernovae; called \".Ia\'s\". The first such candidate may well have been found by the Palomar Transient Factory.","",""];
April[3]=["26","Irwin Shapiro","Harvard","Defending Planet Earth Against Cosmic Intruders","","",""];
May[0]=["3","Michael Strauss","Princeton","The Evolution of Quasars with Cosmic Time","While the luminosity and mass distributions of quasars have evolved dramatically with cosmic time, the physical properties of quasars of a given luminosity are remarkably independent to redshift.  I will describe recent results on the spectra of luminous quasars, the dark matter halos in which they sit, and the intergalactic medium of their host galaxies, that are essentially indistinguishable from moderate redshifts to z>6.  The one property apparently unique to the highest-redshift quasars is that some small fraction show evidence for having very little infrared excess from hot dust.","",""];
May[1]=["10","Jeremy Goodman","Princeton","Shear-driven turbulence on earth and in space","Motivated by astronomical accretion disks in which magnetorotational instability (MRI) may be locally or episodically suppressed, such as protostellar disks, recent laboratory experiments have studied hydrodynamic turbulence in rotating shear flows at Reynolds numbers (Re) above one million. Positive radial angular-momentum gradients are found to inhibit turbulence, but to a degree that is disputed among experimenters, and it is not agreed whether hydrodynamic turbulence is possible for keplerian flow profiles. Numerical simulations, which better control boundary conditions but have been limited to lower Re, find strong inhibition. Complicating matters is the discovery that turbulence is transient, both numerically and experimentally, absent linear instabilities or forcing. Turbulent half-lives increase with Re, but there is no sharp threshold separating persistently laminar from persistently turbulent states. Transience is also seen in some zero-net-flux MRI simulations. One avenue for progress may have been opened by the discovery of self-sustaining nonlinear structures near turbulent \"transition\" in plane-Couette, pipe, and perhaps shearing-box flow. These matters will be reviewed, and preliminary results from a new suite of higher-Re shearing-box simulations will be presented.","",""];
May[2]=["17","Jeremy Kasdin","Princeton","Direct Imaging of Terrestrial Exoplanets:  Approaches and Progress in High-Contrast Imaging from Space","","",""];
//May[3]=["24","Doug Richstone","Michigan/IAS","","","",""];
//May[4]=["31","","","Local Speakers only - No Housing","","",""];
//June[0]=["7","Chris Hirata","Caltech","","","",""];
//June[1]=["14","","","OPEN","","",""];
September[0]=["20","Leonidas Moustakas","JPL","Galaxy clusters and cosmic structure","Through their census, internal structure, and substructure, galaxy clusters encode signatures of the expansion history of the universe, and basic properties of the dark matter particle.  I will present early work on systematic multi-wavelength studies of galaxy clusters recently discovered at redshifts beyond one, and recent quantitative cluster structure results from the Multi-Cycle program Cluster Lensing And Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH).  I will discuss possible sources of systematic error, and if these are understood, how these results may lend unique insight now (or in the near future) on the nature of dark energy, and dark matter.","",""];
September[1]=["27","Avi Loeb","Harvard CfA","New Probes of Strong Gravity near Black Holes","The lecture will present new techniques that will be employed over the coming decade to probe strong field gravity in the vicinity of black holes. Advances in technology (in the form of long baseline interferometry at millimeter wavelength) allow us already to image the silhouette of the black holes in the Galactic center (SgrA*) and M87. I will present the current preliminary data and its implications. Second, the gravitational radiation emitted by tight black hole binaries will be detectable with upcoming observatories, such as Advanced-LIGO and LISA. Third, the recoil induced by the anisotropic emission of gravitational waves in the final plunge of supermassive binaries could produce transient electromagnetic counterparts and also imprint detectable scars on their host galaxies. New surveys for transients (PTF, Pan-STARRS, LSST, WFIRST) will be sensitive to such counterparts, as well as to flares associated with the tidal disruption of stars which get close to the horizon of single massive black holes.","",""];
October[0]=["4","Jay Wacker","Stanford/SLAC","LHC Results from 2011 and Their Implications for Physics Beyond the Standard Model","Abstract.","",""];
October[1]=["11","Rashid Sunyaev","IAS/Max Planck","Coronal radiation of a cusp of spun-up stars and the X-ray luminosity of Sgr A*","Chandra has detected optically thin, thermal X-ray emission with a size of ~1 arcsec and luminosity ~10^33 erg/s from the direction of the Galactic supermassive black hole (SMBH), Sgr A*. We suggest that a significant or even dominant fraction of this signal may be produced by several thousand late-type main-sequence stars that possibly hide in the central ~0.1 pc region of the Galaxy. As a result of tidal spin-ups caused by close encounters with other stars and stellar remnants, these stars should be rapidly rotating and hence have hot coronae, emitting copious amounts of X-ray emission with temperatures kT<~ a few keV. The Chandra data thus place an interesting upper limit on the space density of (currently unobservable) low-mass main-sequence stars near Sgr A*. This bound is close to and consistent with current constraints on the central stellar cusp provided by infrared observations. If coronally active stars do provide a significant fraction of the X-ray luminosity of Sgr A*, it should be variable on hourly and daily time scales due to giant flares occurring on different stars. Another consequence is that the quiescent X-ray luminosity and accretion rate of the SMBH are yet lower than believed before.","",""];
October[2]=["18","Uros Seljak","UC Berkeley","The Future of Large Scale Structure: Weak Lensing or Galaxy Clustering","Abstract.","",""];
October[3]=["25","Rachel Somerville","Rutgers University","Piecing together the puzzle of galaxy and black hole co-evolution .","Nearly all astronomers now believe that most or all galaxies contain a supermassive black hole, and that many properties of the galaxy are tightly correlated with the mass of the black hole. It is becoming widely accepted that the energy released by these growing black holes probably has a significant impact on the host galaxy and its surroundings, and it has been suggested that this process of 'AGN feedback' could solve some outstanding problems in cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. However, many important questions remain unanswered: how do the 'seed' black holes form and what are their masses? How is black hole growth triggered and regulated, and what is the physical origin of the correlation between black hole mass and galaxy properties? What is the relationship between star formation and black hole accretion? How, in detail, does the energy released by accreting black holes couple with the gas that surrounds and feeds galaxies? I will address these questions with an overview of recent observational results from deep multi-wavelength surveys, and with predictions from theoretical models and simulations.","",""];
November[0]=["1","Jerry Sellwood","Rutgers University","New Developments in Spiral Structure Theory","Over 150 years after their discovery, astronomers still lack a complete theory for the origin of the beautiful spiral patterns in disk galaxies.  I will review the various ideas that have been proposed and describe some recent observational data that appear to support a recurrent instability mechanism.","",""];
November[1]=["8","Will Farr","Northwestern University","Decoding Gravitational Wave Signals from Double Compact Objects" ,"Abstract.","",""];
November[2]=["15","Liam McAllister","Cornell University","Universality in Multifield Inflation","Abstract.","",""];
November[3]=["22","Eve Ostriker","University of Maryland","Galactic-Scale Star Formation Rates: An Efficient Market","Recent surveys have established increasingly precise correlations between star formation rates (SFRs) and the gas, stellar, and dark matter contents of galaxies. Outer galactic disks are dominated by atomic gas and have steep Kennicutt-Schmidt (KS) relations. Mid-disks are dominated by molecular gas and have nearly linear KS relations. Starburst regions (in ULIRGs and high-z galaxies) are molecule-dominated and have steep KS relations. Recent data also confirm a pervasive inefficiency of gas consumption: for all regimes, the gas supply divided by the local dynamical time far exceeds the SFR. To understand these empirical relations, it is crucial to consider the ISM physics at scales small compared to the disk thickness, and the demands imposed by rapid gas cooling and dissipation of turbulence. Recently, we have developed theoretical models in which feedback from massive stars self-regulates SFRs, subject to local environmental conditions including the stellar and dark matter gravitational potentials. In equilibrium, the SFR adjusts until ISM heating balances cooling, total pressure balances gravity, and turbulent driving balances dissipation. These models are in remarkably good agreement with observations in all three regimes of star formation, and have been confirmed and calibrated using multiphase numerical hydrodynamic simulations. From this perspective, it is the high efficiency of massive-star feedback -- stellar UV and expanding SN remnants replenish thermal and turbulent energy in less than a dynamical time -- that enables low gas consumption and sustained star formation in disk galaxies.","",""];
November[4]=["29","Michel Mayor","Geneva Observatory","Statistical Properties of the Population of Super-Earths and Neptune-type Planets.","Abstract.","",""];
December[0]=["6","Marc Kamionkowski","Johns Hopkins University","Formalism and Function with the CMB","Abstract.","",""];
//December[1]=["","","","","","",""];