Astronomy and Coffee

Back from Prague

After the whole week in Prague at the IAU GA, I came back on friday night and managed to get a strong cold durring the weeked which basically let me "out of combat" until today.

Those days were more like putting the train back on track and organizing the things discussed and seen in Prague. Tomorrow there will be some paper work, anyway to get the money back.

About the meeting. There were some interesting general talks this first week, like John Mather's talk for the Gruber Cosmology Prize and Jill Tarter's talk about here work (i.e. SETI) very nice and impressive, both of them.

I also took part in the IAU Symp 235 and a joint discussion about High-z galaxies.

Some comments about some of the talks (not the best, or the most important, but the ones that called my attention).

- Ben Moore showed some problems with SPH against GRID codes when dealing with fluids ...

- Claudia Mendes de Oliveira talk was very nice (I know she was my supervisor, but it was a great talk, as usual, I really like her talks). She spoke about Fossil Groups, something I'm really interested lately.

- Anette Ferguson spoke about satelites dissolution, which I'm interested on how much of the diffuse component can come from this kind of process.

- Brad Whitmore (ate the Symp 237) gave us a great "lecture" about globular clusters. Survival of the young clusters, the absence of high velocity colisions pointing to the fact that the Giant Molecular Clouds may be already there, the faint objects in Antenae would be faint clusters not bright stars and that young clusters are present in mergers of galaxies, but also in spiral galaxies.

- Robert Abrahan showed downsizing in the GDDS (76% of the mass is in massive galaxies and 69% of this mass is in early-type galaxies). Told us to take care with the Assimetry X Concentration plot (his own baby) and showed us the "Gini's coefficient". Conclusion of the talk "Strong evolution in 1 < z < 2". Chris Conselice pointed out that a more robust definition of concentration would end the problem with the Assim X Cons plot.

- Andrea Cimatti told us about widefield surveys in 0 < z < 1. Downsizing at GMASS where Early-type galaxies would be already assembled at z ~ 0.8 and lower mass galaxies would continue to assemble at 0 < z < 0.8 and that "Dry Mergers" would not be a dominant mechanism to assemble massive galaxies.

Mostly that!

Besides that some work meetings, closing papers and talking to old and good friends. Dinner with them and some Czech beer also!! It was a good week.

posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 5:13 PM