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November 15, 2024 past

PUG Seminar

Whitmore 321 (IGC Lounge)

PUG Seminar

Compact objects like neutron stars, black holes, and white dwarfs are studied through various observational channels, but distinguishing them often majorly depends on assumed mass ranges. Are these mass ranges theoretically robust, or could different compact objects act as "imposters" within overlapping ranges? This talk explores the limitations and biases in current classification methods and discusses their broader implications for fundamental physics.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2024-11-15 14:00 Sanika Khadkikar The Imposter Among Us
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.