Title: Status and Future of The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope

Speaker: Dr. Geoffrey Bower (East Asian Observatory)

Special Time：3:00 pm Dec.17th (Wednesday)

Tencent Meeting: 669154699, password: 6360

Location: Lecture Hall, 3rd floor

Abstract：

I will summarize the current status and future plans for the world’s largest sub millimeter telescope, the JCMT. The JCMT provides a powerful suite of instruments for wide-field mapping, heterodyne spectroscopy, and very long baseline interferometry. These have been used extensively and with high impact including the discovery and characterization of sub millimeter galaxies, studies of star-formation and galaxy evolution, and the first images of the black holes in M87 and Sgr A* with the Event Horizon Telescope.  New observing programs in the areas of VLBI, time domain science, and intensity mapping will play key roles in the future of the JCMT and new instrumentation will lead to order of magnitude improvements in capability.

CV：

Dr. Geoffrey Bower is the President of the East Asian Observatory and Director of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Previously, he served as Project Scientist of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration and as Chief Scientist for Hawaii Operations for Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Dr. Bower has published in a wide range of fields including black holes, pulsars, cosmology, radio transients, and radio instrumentation. He has received the Breakthrough Prize in Physics as an EHTC member, among other awards.

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Title: From Order to Chaos and Back to Planets

Speaker: Dr. Min-Kai Lin (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics)

Time：3:00 pm Dec.18th (Thursday)

Tencent Meeting：46822606747 password: 6360

Location: Lecture Hall, 3rd floor

Abstract：

The ubiquity and diversity of the more than 6000 known exoplanets challenge us to understand their birthplaces: the protoplanetary disks surrounding young stars. These disks exhibit complex gas dynamics that play key roles in all stages of planet formation and evolution. I will present our group’s recent theoretical work on the dynamics of embedded dust grains, which provide the raw material for planet formation, under the influence of hydrodynamic instabilities, thermodynamics, magnetic fields, etc., as expected in realistic disks. I will also discuss the rich disk structures induced by young planets, such as gaps and rings, their modeling using artificial intelligence, and a new ambitious effort to simulate disk-planet interaction with an explicit treatment of turbulence. Throughout, I will highlight promising directions for future collaborations.

CV：

Dr. Min-Kai Lin is an Associate Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taipei. He completed his PhD in 2011 at the University of Cambridge, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics from 2011 to 2014, and was a Steward Theory Fellow at the University of Arizona from 2014 to 2016, before taking up his current faculty position at ASIAA. Dr. Lin's primary expertise is astrophysical fluid dynamics applied to theories of planet formation and evolution.