Astronomy and Coffee

Back from Croatia!!

OK! After a while I'm back! The trip to Italy and then Croatia was great. Small flight delay, but not enough to bother. The trip back, on the other hand, was terrible. We got a over delay on the flight to leave Trieste, because of a storm. This delay made us loose the connection to Frankfurt. We stayed at a fancy hotel in Munich and traded our ticket for a fast train ticket so that we would get faster and straight to Goettingen. But, the Lufthansa/D-Bahn arrangements do not work well and we still had some problems with the train on Sunday morning. Anyway we got home!

Today was a arrangements day, small things and try to put life on track. We also had a group meeting where we summarized the school for the others.

The paper is "almost" accepted. There was two small comments on "text style", which were made and I'm waiting for the final acceptation.

I'll post below a "on the fly" summary of the school, written every day after class ...

There were some nice stuff on the school, like the hotel, the beach, the beach-volleyball matches and of course the people. Is always nice to meet people at schools!

It's interesting to see so many people from so many different countries talking to each other basically in English. The sentence we heard the most was, definitively, "WHAT????", which is a good to thing to ask after listening to something weird an avoid misunderstandings!

Croatia, specially Novigrad, is very beautiful! Nice people (when they are nice), it was really a great time! The school was also great, nice subject, I liked the organization and the structure of the school!

There were also some funny stuff on the lectures, but the one to comment (also commented below) was the sentence mentioned by Ivezic "Everything is correlated with everything", from Blanton et al 2003, which really sounds like David Hogg :-)))

Mainly that! Tomorrow proposals and projects back on track!!!

BTW, Italian coffee in Italy ... no comments :-) Croatian coffee is Italian, what means we were good about it!!

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Small summary of the school!!

Thursday I got a flight to Trieste through Munich and using a very small plane to get there! Fun! :-) At the end of the day, Thorsten (friend from Goettingen) got to Trieste also.

Friday I gave a talk at SISSA, just a few people (vacation + Friday) but some nice comments and questions.

Saturday was a touristic day, we went to Venezia, traditional touristic thing :-) At night Miguel (another friend from Goettingen) arrived.

Sunday we visited Trieste and joined with the other of the conference to go to Croatia.

So the conference started.

First day of conference:

Pearce talked about numerical simulations, describing Collisionless and hydrodynamical methods. Giving the advantages and drawbacks of each of the main ones. Very nice class!!

Seljak gave a basic review about cosmology and its basic questions, from expansion to Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

To finish the day Matarrese talked about inflation.

Second day:

First Seljak with the probes of LSS, focusing mainly CMB, up to the power spectrum.

Pearce finish his lectures talking about setting of initial conditions of simulations, techniques and high performance simulations. Great hints and suggestions.

Salucci talked about Dark Matter in galaxy scales. Today, mainly rotation curves and Tully-Fisher relations measured in different disk scale lengths.

To finish the day Bartelmann gave us an introduction to gravitational lensing, from the multiple quasar images to the history of light curvature, until the deflection angle of the light beam.

Third day:

Seljak finished his lectures talking about polarization of the CMB, causes and implications and talking about galaxy clustering.

Granato talked about co-evolution of galaxies and quasars, first showing how models of galaxy formation can be improved by the inclusion of a supermassive black hole and than how a supermassive black hole can be formed.

After lunch we had a Volley-ball tournament ... fun in the sand!!

Salucci talked more rotation curves and mass models to galaxies comparing them with simulation predicted profiles.

Bartelmann finished the lensing equation deduction to single lens, potential shear and convergence. Got to caustics and critical curves and to strong and weak lensing theory.

Forth day:

Bartelmann finished his course with Limber's equation, cosmic shear and lensing on CMB.

Matarrese finished his talk on inflation.

On the afternoon we had a nice boat trip!!

Fifth day:

Granato finish his lectures talking about AGN feedback mechanisms.

Salucci also finish his lectures talking about the Tully-Fisher relation probing dark matter in the inner part in spirals DM halo mass functions.

Cimatti talked about High-z galaxies. How to design a survey, select fields and how to detect the high-z galaxies.

To finish the day McLure talked about BH-Sph mass relation.

Sixth day (Saturday ... pretty tuff school :-)) ):

Cimatti finish his lectures talking about the global galaxy evolution.

Than we had for small talks from the "students" of the school. I started taking about the diffuse light in HCG (by the way, paper accepted during the school by MNRAS). Chiara Tonini talked about the angular momentum on DM halos. Laura Lopez talked about a possible DM particle, a WIMP limited by DM constraints. To finish the morning and the day, Eduardo Rozo talked about substructure on galaxies affecting lensing effects.

Seventh day (Monday):

The "observational week" starts!!

First McLure finished his lectures talking about the observations of the coevolution of AGNs and galaxies, how the BH-Sph mass relation should or not hold for high-z galaxies and how to observe this.

Then Rosati talked about observations of properties of clusters of galaxies.

Matteucci gave a lecture on chemical evolution of galaxies, on which are the chemical enrichment models avaliable and a bit of history.

To end the day Ivezic talked about optical sky surveys. A bit of history and the products and results of SDSS. The interesting result of the bimodality on all the analysis (which somehow match the work of Dekel where the low mass DM haloes would form blue SF galaxies and high mass haloes the Red and Dead galaxies). The funny part was the quote of Blanton et al (2003) "Everything is correlated with everything" which really sound like Hogg hehehehehe :-))) Very interesting multi-parameter analysis from the NYU group.

Eight day:

Started with Rosati talking about high-z clusters.

Ivezic talked about the cross analysis of SDSS and other wavelength surveys, like 2MASS and Galex. And ended his lecture with the advertisement of LSST ... an amazing stuff!!!

Matteucci ended also with chemical enrichment models for Spiral, Irregular and Elliptical galaxies.

Ending the day, Cristiani talked about the IGM absorption lines, with an introduction to absorption lines and then the Lyman-alpha forest and other obsorbers.

Ninth day:

The day started with the last two lectures of Ivezic and talked about the stars detected by SDSS and how the measured distances can be used to constrain the galaxy models, like the thick disk. Also about a overdensity of stars in the direction of Virgo, possibly a galaxy which is being accreted by the MW.

Borgani talked about the models of cluster formation coming from Press-Schechter formulation until the newest models.

Menci complemented Cimatti's lectures with the first lecture on the theoretical part of galaxy formation.

And Cristiani talked about the number of HI clouds and its evolution in redshift.

Tenth day:

Today I was the chairman! Spent the whole day showing 5 minutes signs and asking "questions??" :-)))

So, Cristiani talked about the temperature of the HI clouds and how the Lyman-alpha forest can be used to trace dark matter and closed his lectures with measurements of CMB temperature at higher redshifts.

Borgani finished his lectures about how to constrain dark energy with clusters, baryon fractions and self similar models and ended with calibration of clusters as cosmological tools.

Menci talked about sub-clumps of DM haloes and the stellar content of the galaxies and its formation.

To finish the day De Angelis talked about DM detection from the particle physics point of view. WIMPs are the best candidates :-)) Talked about the possible detection made by DAMA. He presented also the various instruments and ways to detect it, from EGRET to GLAST passing by Cherenkov telescopes and Air Shower experiments. Presented to finish the new instruments like Magic, Canguroo, Veritas and H.E.S.S.

Eleventh and last day:

Menci finished his lectures about galaxy evolution and the building of the stellar content.

After the last lecture we had 5 talks from the participants of the school. Kim Nilson talked about H-alpha blobs, Miguel Verdugo about galaxy populations and star formation on clusters at redshift about 0.2. Silvia Ameglio talked about simulation of clusters for SZ measurements, Eros Vanzella talked about Goods survey and photometric redshift using neural networks. To finish Fabio Fontanot talked about deep surveys versus wide fields survey for quasars and constrains to the quasar luminosity function.

posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 6:56 PM