[Astro] [CAPT] CAPT Weekly Bulletin (w/c 26-01-26)

[Ella Batchelor (staff)]

Tuesdays at 11am, CAPT Foyer – Astro Coffee

Tuesdays at 11.30am, A113 CAPT – Astronomy Journal Club



Tuesday 27th January at 1pm, A113 CAPT – Particle Cosmology and Gravity Seminar

Thomas Spieksma (Oxford)

The environment talks back: Black hole binaries beyond vacuum



After a decade of gravitational-wave detections, the field is entering a new era. With next-generation detectors on the horizon, the key question is no longer how many sources we will observe, but how much physics we can extract from them. Addressing this challenge requires moving beyond some of the simplifying assumptions used in most studies so far, such as circular orbits, aligned spins, or black holes evolving in vacuum. Paradoxically, it is precisely these complexities that may encode the richest opportunities for gravitational waves to reveal new astrophysical phenomena and, potentially, new fundamental physics.

In this talk, I will focus on one such scenario by discussing how astrophysical environments can influence black hole binaries. In particular, I will describe the signatures that superradiant boson clouds may imprint on gravitational-wave signals and outline the modelling tools being developed to accurately capture the dynamics of these systems. I will also highlight the key open problems and challenges that must be addressed to fully realise this potential.



Link to join: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OGM3OTk5NzQtZWEwZS00ZmUyLTk3MGUtZjFhY2M5OTU2MjI1%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2267bda7ee-fd80-41ef-ac91-358418290a1e%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22f3250584-4b5f-48fa-a897-08e77f2246b7%22%7d
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Wednesday 28th January at 3pm, B13 Physics – School Colloquium

Emma Chapman

Should we just give up? Continuing the search for the first stars



The Epoch of Reionization (EoR) follows the end of the Dark Ages of the Universe and signals the birth of the first stars. The aim of the current generation of radio telescopes is to make the first statistical detection of this epoch, covering 400 million - 1 billion years after the Big Bang. For the next generation Square Kilometre array, we will have an order of magnitude improved sensitivity and can pursue imaging over this time. However, foregrounds cover the cosmological data by several orders of magnitude, and their removal remains a significant challenge. It has been over a decade since we turned on the current generation telescope LOFAR, and still there is no detection… should we just give up?



Refreshments served in C10 after the Colloquium

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Thursday 29th January at 1pm, A113 CAPT – Astronomy Lunch Talk

Jacob Campbell

Co-ordinate transformations in substructure detection using gravitational lensing



Strong gravitational lensing provides a natural probe for dark matter distributions around galaxies due to its sole dependence on the mass distribution of the lens galaxy. Over the past decade, machine learning has been coupled with this in an attempt to establish a pipeline for extracting substructure information from lensing images in anticipation of the next generation of wide surveys such as Euclid and LSST. As of yet, however, the required accuracy has yet to be obtained, highlighting a need for more advanced machine learning architectures and techniques. In this talk, I will present a data augmentation technique that boosts network performance without the need for higher resolution observations or more complex machine learning architectures.



Thursday 29th January at 2.45pm, A113 CAPT – Particle Cosmology Journal Club

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Fridays at 4pm, CAPT Foyer – CAPT Cakes
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If you have any events/visitors you would like included in next week’s bulletin, please let me know.


Best wishes

Ella

Ella Batchelor (she/her)
Administrator

School of Physics & Astronomy

University of Nottingham
A112a Centre for Astronomy & Particle Theory
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

+44 (0) 115 74 86778 |  nottingham.ac.uk<http://nottingham.ac.uk/>

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