// Enter speaker information here. The format is:
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// ["Date","Name","Affiliation","Title","Abstract","Day","Time"]
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// is possible (like <br>, <b>, etc.).
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// ** Edited to add color change for special day/time.
// ** If Day or Time field is not empty, special day/time
// ** is/are added in date column in red.
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//September[0]=["8","","","","","",""];
September[0]=["15","Daniel Mortlock","Imperial College","Searching for redshift ~ 7 quasars with UKIDSS","","",""];
September[1]=["22","You-Hua Chu","UIUC","Planetary Systems around White Dwarfs","As a low- or intermediate-mass star evolve to the final white dwarf stage, it often loses more than 50% of its original mass.  Consequently, its planetary system expands, and the collision rates among the subplanetary bodies, such as asteroids and comets, would increase. While no planets have been convincingly detected around white dwarfs, dust disks produced by tidally disrupted asteroids or collisions among comets have been reported.  We have conducted a Spitzer MIPS 24 micron survey of hot white dwarfs, and archival Spitzer IRAC/MIPS surveys of white dwarfs and central star of planetary nebulae. IR excesses indicative of dust disks have been found in many cases.  I will report these results and discuss their implications on planetary systems.","",""];
September[2]=["29","Bhuvnesh Jain","Upenn","Tests of Gravity in the Local Universe","Gravity theories and large-scale cosmological tests have been actively pursued in recent years. This talk will focus on a new arena for astrophysical tests of gravity: dwarf galaxies and stars in the nearby universe. Theoretical predictions and observational constraints from existing data will be discussed.","",""];
October[0]=["6","Simeon Bird","IAS","Massive Neutrinos and the Non-linear Matter Power Spectrum","Measurements of the matter power spectrum provide an unparalleled opportunity for constraining the mass of the neutrino, due to the damping effect of the neutrino thermal velocity on the growth of cosmic structure. I will discuss recent results which use N-body simulations to fully explore this effect even in the fully non-linear regime.","",""];
October[1]=["13","Cora Dvorkin","IAS","Constraints on Inflationary Features from the CMB","I introduce a general method for constraining the shape of the inflationary potential from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization power spectra. This approach relates the CMB observables to the shape of the inflationary potential via a single source function that is responsible for the observable features in the initial curvature power spectrum. The source function is, to an excellent approximation, simply related to the slope and curvature of the inflaton potential, even in the presence of large or rapidly changing deviations from scale-free initial conditions. Oscillatory features in the CMB temperature power spectrum have led to interest in exploring models with features in the inflationary potential, but such cases are typically studied on a case-by-case basis. This formalism generalizes previous studies by exploring the complete parameter space of inflationary models in a single analysis. I will present results from a Markov Chain Monte Carlo likelihood analysis of WMAP 7-year and other data sets that probe the inflationary potential both at large and small scales, and I will discuss constraints from upcoming high-sensitivity experiments.","",""];
October[2]=["20","Mordecai-Mark Mac Low","American Museum of Natural History","The Formation of Molecular Clouds and Massive Stars","In this talk I consider two questions.  First, I investigate the formation of molecular clouds from diffuse interstellar gas.  It has been argued that the midplane pressure controls the fraction of molecular hydrogen present, and thus the star formation rate. Alternatively, I and others have suggested that the gravitational instability of the disk controls both.  I present numerical results demonstrating that the observed correlations between midplane pressure, molecular hydrogen fraction, and star formation rate can be explained within the gravitational instability picture. Second, I discuss how ionization affects the formation of massive stars. Although most distinctive observables of massive stars can be traced back to their ionizing radiation, it does not appear to have a strong effect on their actual formation.  Rather, I present simulations suggesting that stars only ionize large volumes after their accretion has already been throttled by gravitational fragmentation in the accretion flow. At the same time these models can explain many aspects of the observations of ultracompact H II regions.","",""];
October[3]=["21 (4pm)","Oliver Zahn","Berkeley","New Constraints on Cosmological Reionization from the South Pole Telescope","","",""];
October[4]=["27","Jo Bovy","IAS","The phase-space structure of mono-abundance sub-populations of the Milky Way disk","","",""];
November[0]=["3","Nikhil Padmanabhan","Yale","Constructing a Hubble Diagram with Baryon Oscillations"," ","",""];
November[1]=["10","Doron Kushnir","Weizmann Institute","A physical mechanism for deflagration-to-detonation transitions (DDTs)","DDTs are observed in terrestrial combustion flows, and are inferred to occur in supernova explosions of type Ia. The physical mechanism responsible for DDT, in both chemical and nuclear combustion, is a long standing open question. We propose (arXiv:1108.4690) a novel mechanism for the transition, showing that detonation may be ignited by converging shocks in nearly sonic turbulent deflagration flows. The suggested mechanism is an alternative to the one proposed by Zeldovich et al. (1970), in which finely tuned spatial gradients in the combustible medium must be maintained in the turbulent deflagration flow. The model makes predictions that may be tested by both terrestrial experiments and numerical simulations.","",""];
November[2]=["17","Derek Richardson","Maryland","Simulating Granular Dynamics in Low Gravity","","",""];
November[3]=["24","No talk","Thanksgiving","","","",""];
December[0]=["1","Lixin (Jane) Dai","Stanford","Roche Accretion Of Stars Close To Massive Black Holes","We consider the Roche accretion in an Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspiral (EMRI) binary system formed by a star orbiting a massive black hole. The ultimate goal is to constrain the mass and spin of the black hole and confirm general relativity in the strong-field regime from the resulted quasi-periodic signals. Before accretion starts, the star orbits the hole in a circular, equatorial stellar orbit, which shrinks due to gravitational radiation. If the inspiralling star fills its Roche lobe outside the Innermost Stable Circular Orbit (ISCO) of the hole, gas will flow through the inner Lagrange point to the hole. If this mass-transfer happens on a time scale faster than the thermal time scale but slower than the dynamical time scale, the star will evolve adiabatically, and, in most cases, will recede from the hole. We calculate how the stellar orbits and mass-transfer rates will change as various types of stars are tidally stripped in the relativistic regime, and discussed the stability during the process. We envisage that the mass stream eventually hits the accretion disc, where it forms a hot spot orbiting the hole and may ultimately modulate the luminosity with the stellar orbital frequency.  The observability of such a modulation is discussed along with possible interpretation of an intermittent 1 hour period in the X-ray emission of RE J1034+396.","",""];
//December[1]=["8","","","","","",""];