High Energy Astrophysics & Compact Object Lunch

Tuesdays 12 noon in 544 Campbell Hall every other week
For any ?'s, contact Eliot Quataert or Steve Boggs

Spring 2003

2/18:  Emrah Kalemci will discuss his work on temporal studies of Black Hole X-ray transients.
Reading is here.
 

Fall 2002

9/17/2002:  Wayne Coburn will lead a discussion on x-ray absorption
(cyclotron?) features recently reported in one isolated neutron star
and one AXP. The relevant papers are:

"Discovery of Absorption Features in the X-Ray Spectrum of an Isolated Neutron Star"

Chandra High-Resolution Spectrum of the Anomalous X-Ray Pulsar 4U 0142+61

"Comment on ``Discovery of the absorption features in the X-ray spectrum
of an isolated neutron star''"

Spring 2002

2/12/2002:  Jon Arons & Don Backer will lead a discussion on
                     "polar cap weather on neutron stars" (from radio
                      pulsar timing).

Readings:  Lyne & Ashworth, Deshpande & Rankin.  For some theoretical
context, Jon suggests Section VI of Ruderman & Sutherland

2/19/2002:  We will discuss Selfgravity and QSO disks by Jeremy Goodman; Yuri will help lead.
                      This paper addresses some of the complex issues associated with how mass makes
                       it from galactic scales to the black hole in AGN, focusing on the outer parts
                       of the disk where self-gravity and star formation are probably important.

3/11/02:       We will discuss Saturation of the R-mode Instability by Arras et al.  The first
                      and last sections provide a nice summary of the context and results.   This week
                      we will meet up at SSL.

4/2/02:        Andrew Westphal is going to lead a discussion of some of his instrument work.
                      A recommended paper is: ``Evidence against stellar chromospheric origin of
                       galactic cosmic rays,''  Westphal, et al.,  Nature 396, 50 (1998).
                      We will meet in 501 Campbell.

4/9/02:          We will talk about X-ray Clusters and "Cooling Flows" in the Chandra and XMM era.
                       A nice & brief review of some of the issues is McNamara et al. at astro-ph/0012331
                       (a somewhat longer and somewhat more recent version is McNamara
                     astro-ph/0202199).  Lunch will be in Campbell.