Turbulence is essential to many fundamental processes in protoplanetary disks, including angular momentum transport, dust evolution, and planet migration. I will focus on two instabilities that can drive turbulent motions in outer disks. In the first part of this talk, a series of global 3D non-ideal MHD simulations via Athena++ code will be presented. The outer disk is found to be weakly MRI t...
The evolution of galaxies is closely connected to the gas environment in which galaxies reside. Traditionally, this tenuous gas that cycles in and out of galaxies has been studied primarily in absorption using quasar spectroscopy. The deployment of large integral field spectrographs at 8 meter telescopes, and in particular MUSE at VLT, has transformed our view of the interplay between the ambie...
Anomalous flux ratios between lensed images can provide a key test of the dark matter sub-halo population, and hence the nature of dark matter. However, the observed anomalous flux ratios at radio frequencies can also be the result of systematics associated with our lack of knowledge about the source structure, source variability, propagation effects and microlensing of compact objects within t...
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is one of the most important assumptions applied in astronomical studies. The stellar populations in the local universe appear to have a universal and invariant IMF which has been adopted as the standard canonical IMF since 1955. However, observations in recent decays suggest that the IMF, in fact, varies in more extreme environments. In this talk, I wil...
Coronal magnetic fields are at the heart of most of the unsolved problems in solar physics and of the solar–terrestrial relationship. However, no routine measurements have been carried out for the magnetic field measurement in the solar corona, due to the weakness of its signature. In the past several decades, a number of techniques have been developed for coronal magnetic field diagnostics. I...