Graduate Student Seminar with Dominic Bernardi on Cosmic Waves

Get ready to dive deep into the magnetospheric madness of magnetars and their wild wave mode conversion antics. In this talk, we’ll not only discuss plasma physics and astrophysical phenomena, but we’ll also talk about what a magnetar actually is. We’ll look at plasma waves and the weird things they do around extreme objects using as few equations as possible, and as many simulations. If I have time, we’ll talk about why this matters, but if not, is that really why we do physics? We’ll discuss a bit about general astrophysics transients and probably look at a lot of dog pictures because, in the words of chat gpt, “even in the vastness of space, there's always room for a little canine cuteness”.