Flatiron Institute, Center for Computational Astrophysics Colloquium

Marta Bryan explores what gas giants reveal about the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Their brightness and mass make them useful observational targets, and their gravitational influence can reshape the orbits and environments of smaller planets. The seminar combines several approaches. High-resolution spectroscopy of directly imaged planets measures rotation and obliquity, providing evidence about angular-momentum evolution. Radial-velocity searches for Jupiter-like companions to known inner planets probe how giant planets affect system architecture and inform the search for habitable worlds. The presentation also introduces observational work on planetary interiors and magnetic fields as further ways to test formation models.

Paco Villaescusa examines how simulations and artificial intelligence change the extraction of physical knowledge from precision cosmological surveys. The talk asks how much information lies in large-scale structure beyond power spectra, including nonlinear scales and higher-order statistics, and introduces the Quijote and Backlight simulation programmes. It then addresses the uncertain astrophysical processes that complicate small-scale inference through CAMELS, a framework combining cosmology, galaxy formation and machine learning. DREAMS is presented as a route to predicting dark-matter observables while accounting for baryonic uncertainties. The final part considers coupling simulations with increasingly capable AI: Denario is introduced as an agentic research system that generates hypotheses, designs analyses, writes and executes code, interprets results and refines research directions. The discussion considers what coordinated populations of agents and simulations spanning physical scales could make possible.