Have you ever wondered how the Universe works or where it all came from? Have you ever been curious about how many planets there are out there? Or even what it would be like to fall in to a black hole?! Find out at one of our public lectures!

KIPAC Public Lectures are held once per month and are free and open to all.

Find out what we have in store for you here, or to keep up to date, sign up to our mailing list.

KIPAC meets twice a week, Tuesdays at 11am on campus and Fridays at 10:30am at SLAC. At these "KIPAC Teas" we share news and announcements, meet new people and visitors, point out interesting new papers to each other, and hear a 15 minute tea talk. The menu for the next KIPAC Tea can be found here.

Tea talks should be short (15 minutes or less speaking time), and need not present completed projects. In fact, works in progress and half-baked ideas are encouraged: the hope is that giving the talk will useful to the speaker, by generating useful feedback from the group. You can either volunteer yourself, or suggest someone else to give a talk, by emailing the tea organizers attealeaks (at) kipac.stanford.edu. Otherwise you'll be scheduled at some point!

Whatever your topic, please make your talk accessible for a wide audience (ie, pitch it at a first year grad student), as engaging as possible, and stay on target with the timing (there's a lot to get through at tea time!). If you'd like feedback on scientific communication after your talk, please just let the organizers know when you send them your title. More detailed guidelines for giving tea talks can be found here.

We use the vox charta system for collectively identifying interesting papers for discussion. Please make yourself an account, log in and click "promote" on papers that you think will be interesting to the group. Promoting a paper just means you'd like to hear that paper discussed -the tea organisers will find someone else to comment on it! For this system to work as an effective social filter, we need many people quickly scanning the arxiv postings and promoting papers - the benefit of being in the group is that it minimises the time you have to spend reading astro-ph listings. Just look for the things you are interested in, and learn about everything else at tea. For help getting started check out the vox charta FAQ. All KIPAC members are strongly encouraged to post and then comment on their own papers too: here is a list of recent KIPAC papers.

Guidelines for presenting a paper can be found here! In short: provide context for listening first year grad students, get to the point, and try and focus on just one figure.

We also use the KIPAC facebook page as a forum for discussing articles in the general news about astrophysics and cosmology -  post your links to newspapers, TV clips, blogs etc here, or, again, email them to tealeaks (at) kipac.stanford.eduand one of the tea organizers will post them for you.

KIPAC co-hosts the Astrophysics Colloquium, held both at campus and SLAC at 11 a.m. on Thursdays.  The location can be found on our events calendar.  All interested parties are welcome to attend, and food is served.  

Please contact Becky Canning, Elisabeth Krause, Mattia di Mauro, Irina Zhuravleva or Jonathan Zrake for more information.

Cosmology Seminars are held at on Mondays at 11 am during the academic year, on the 3rd floor Varian conference room. These are more focused and less didactic than the colloquium, and provide a stage for younger researchers to present their work in more detail.  

Please contact Risa Wechsler, Daniel Gruen, Josh Meyers, or Kyle Story for more information.

Advanced Instrumentation Seminars (AIS) cover topics of interest to the broad cummunity of experimenters at SLAC. Invited speakers represent all facets of technology related to SLAC research including accelerator instrumentation, detectors for both accelerator-based HEP and particle astropysics, and the instrumentation required for a new generations of photon science.

Time and location TBD.

For announcements, subscribe to the the astro-mass mailing list.

MASS is a forum for graduate students in astronomy and astrophysics to discuss important ideas which nevertheless tend to be absent from classes, colloquia, and tea talks. It is intended to provide a crash course in the theoretical, observational, and experimental aspects of many areas of astrophysics and an informal setting in which to discuss our own work. Undergrads and non-astro types are welcome to join. Postdocs and faculty are also welcome; however, the content of the meetings will be aimed at students who are learning the methods of astronomy and astrophysics for the first time.