Scarlet Speakers from the Heart of New Brunswick with Blakesley Burkhart

Blakesley Burkhart is an assistant professor at Rutgers in the Physics and Astronomy Department and an associate research scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in the Simons Foundation Flatiron Institute. Burkhart is honored to be a 2020 Packard Fellow and 2021 Sloan Fellow.

Abstract: The cycling of material from the interstellar medium of galaxies into stars and the subsequent return of that stellar material via supernova explosions drives the evolution of galaxies in cosmic time. However, the process of star formation has vexed researchers for decades due to the orders of magnitude in scale that material must traverse as well as the complexity of the physics involved. In this talk, I will discuss the exciting advances in numerical simulations of star formation that have recently allowed for detailed statistical comparisons with observational data from scales of giant molecular clouds (20 lightyears) down to the scales of solar systems.