Research
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2021.03.18
Recent Progress in Understanding Tidal Disruption Events
When a star falls sufficiently close to a supermassive black hole, it is disrupted by the enormous tidal forces and then the debris feeds a sudden burst of accretion. Such tidal disruption events (TDE...
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2021.03.16
A new vocabulary for patterns and its cosmological applications, or, a CNN without training
Textures and patterns are ubiquitous in astronomical data but challenging to quantify. The speaker will present a novel statistical tool, called the “scattering transform”. It borrows ideas from con...
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2021.03.11
Highlights of Recent Results from Insight-HXMT: China's 1st X-ray Astronomy Satellite
Insight-HXMT is China’s first X-ray astronomy satellite and was successfully launched on June 15th, 2017. It carries three sets of collimated X-ray instruments with large effective areas, covering en...
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2021.03.04
Reverberation mapping black hole accretion flows
Sitting at the heart of nearly all galaxies is a massive black hole, that, while typically 1000 times less massive than the galaxy in which it resides, has the potential to release enough energy via a...
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2021.02.25
A Song of Ice and Fire: the Fate of Planetary Systems After Stellar Death
In the past 30 years, astronomers have discovered thousands of planets orbiting stars outside the solar system. Most of the exoplanets we know of today orbit stars that will eventually exhaust their n...
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