Kavli Affiliate: Dheeraj Pasham | Summary:The repeated tidal stripping of a star by a supermassive black hole, known as a repeating partial tidal disruption event (rpTDE), can give rise to a transient that rebrightens months to years after the first outburst. Among the rpTDE candidates so far observed, some exhibit dimmer peak luminosities during each […]
Kavli Affiliate: Lina Necib | Summary:Self-Interacting Dark Matter (SIDM) models with large cross sections at relative velocities below $sim100,rm km , s^-1$ can be tested with dwarf galaxy observations. We analyze six dark-matter-only zoom-in $sim10^10,rm M_odot$ halos with diverse assembly histories, adopting a cross section over mass of $σ/m = 70,cm^2 , g^-1$. We find […]
Kavli Affiliate: Erin Kara | Summary:Accretion and relativistic jet formation take place across the black hole mass range, from black holes of just a few solar masses to those in excess of ten billion. Despite the enormous range in scales, qualitative similarities and quantitative scalings appear to connect the entire population. In March 2026, researchers […]
Kavli Affiliate: Avi Shporer | Summary:We present resolutions as to the nature of six speculative candidate companions proposed in the final data release of the Pan-Pacific Planet Search, a 6-year radial-velocity survey of 164 southern evolved stars using the now-decommissioned UCLES spectrograph on the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope. New radial-velocity observations, TESS asteroseismology, and Hipparcos-Gaia astrometry […]
Kavli Affiliate: Michael McDonald | Summary:Galaxy cluster strong gravitational lensing plays a central role in precision cosmology, yet robust theoretical predictions have lagged behind an abundance of high-quality strong lensing observations. This shortfall reflects both a mismatch between the geometry of the strong-lensing problem and standard cubic simulation boxes, and the fundamental tension between simulation […]
Kavli Affiliate: Mark Vogelsberger | Summary:High-redshift active galactic nuclei (AGN) serve as powerful probes of early black-hole growth, galaxy formation, and the evolving intergalactic medium (IGM). In this work, we use Lumina, a cosmological radiation-hydrodynamic simulation spanning the epochs of hydrogen and helium reionization, which combines a large $(500,rm cMpc)^3$ volume with $2times 6000^3$ resolution […]
Kavli Affiliate: Michael McDonald | Summary:Cancer diagnosis and characterization require integrating complementary evidence from radiology, pathology, genomics, and clinical metadata. However, most medical large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks focus on isolated modalities or narrow image-text tasks, leaving patient-level oncology assessment across multiple evidence streams largely untested. We introduce OncoTriad-QA, a patient-level […]
Kavli Affiliate: Andrew Vanderburg | Summary:Theoretical models predict that subgiants within a narrow mass regime can retain detectable lithium enrichment signatures from planetary engulfment. We test this prediction using TOI-5882, selected because it occupies this favorable subgiant parameter space and hosts a massive brown dwarf ($22 , M_ rm J$, $P=7.1 ,rm d$) companion capable […]
Kavli Affiliate: Michael Fausnaugh | Summary:The observational determination of the lower limit of neutron star masses is crucial for the physics of core-collapse supernovae. In this light, SMC X-1 is an important object because of its estimated pulsar mass lying near or potentially below the theoretical lower limit. SMC X-1 exhibits a double peaked optical […]
Kavli Affiliate: Anna Frebel | Summary:We present a detailed chemical-abundance and kinematic analysis of four extremely metal-poor (EMP; [Fe/H] $leq -3.0$) stars identified from textitGaia BP/RP data in our ongoing search for the most primitive stars. This includes a primary target, textitGaia~DR3~2563539603865382656 (hereafter G256353), a strongly $r$-process-enhanced star with [Eu/Fe]~$= +1.20$ and [Ba/Eu]~$= -0.64$. Our […]