Dust plays an important role in planet formation as they grow from micron sized grains to over Mm sized planets. The intermediate stage, to form km-sized planetesimals from mm-cm sized dust particles, has been found to be difficult. These mm-cm sized dust particles frequently distribute in ring-like structures in protoplanetary disks as revealed in ALMA observations. Here, I present a series of...
Completing the census of active galactic nuclei (AGN) activity is the key to study the build-up of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and understand their relations with the host galaxy properties. Nevertheless, many AGNs are obscured by dust and gas, making the identification of such systems a challenging task even today. In this talk, I will present the first results on the AGN identifications ...
Weak gravitational lensing imprints a coherent distortion onto the observed shapes of distant galaxies. At the image level, this gravitational shear degenerates with the intrinsic shape of galaxies, and the weak lensing signal-to-noise from an individual galaxy is of order 0.01. I will describe Kinematic Lensing, a new technique combining imaging and galaxy kinematics to measure weak lensing wi...
The frequency shifts measured in extragalactic Fast radio bursts (FRB)s probe the total column of ionized gas in the foreground, including large contributions from the CGM and IGM. By combining this information with both deep and wide spectroscopic observations of foreground galaxies, the information content is enhanced. The wide-field data (∼10s of Mpc scales) allows us to reconstruct the u...
Data from the Gaia satellite are revolutionizing many fields of astronomy. I will present two related discoveries about white dwarfs: one is an extreme cooling anomaly upon phase transition of some white dwarfs, which stops their cooling for almost 10 Gyrs, and the other is the existence of merger products among single white dwarfs. I will show interesting solution to explain the anomaly and th...