Magnetic field is one of the most important physical quantities regulating the evolution of interstellar medium and star formation in the Milky Way. Despite enormous surveys using techniques of dust polarization, Faraday rotation, and synchrotron polarization to reveal the magnetic field structure of the Milky Way, none of the techniques can give accurate magnetic field strength. Zeeman effect ...
Astronomy today is fundamentally different than it was even just a decade ago. Our increasing ability to collect a large amount of data from ever more powerful instruments has enabled many new opportunities. However, such an opportunity also comes with new challenges. The bottleneck stems from the fact that most astronomical observations are inherently high dimension — from “imaging” the Uni...
In this talk I will discuss promising new opportunities in gravitational wave astronomy as the sensitivity of ground-based gravitational wave detector improves, and when the space-borne detector(s) start their operation. I will use stellar-mass binary black holes, neutron stars and the so-called extreme mass-ratio inspirals as examples of these exciting developments. In the last part of the ta...
The origin of stellar-mass black hole mergers discovered through gravitational waves is being widely debated. Mergers in the disks of active galactic nuclei (AGN) represent a promising source of origin. By modelling the evolution of compact objects in AGN disks, we found that several observational signatures in gravitational wave data are only explained by the AGN channel. Beyond gravitational ...
Gravitational wave has become a new window to explore our universe. Among many events detected so far, GW170817 was the first binary neutron star gravitational wave event joint with electromagnetic observations, which revolutionized our understanding of neutron star physics and the origin of kilonova. However, due to a limited detector sensitivity at the high frequency around kHz, we did not ob...