Abstracts
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"Scientific Writing Workshop for Young Scientists"
What makes one author a good communicator and another a poor one? How does one communicate scientific results through adequate and efficient scientific writing? How does the editorial process of a journal function, and why do scientific papers need to be refereed? All these questions, and many more, were the drivers for the annual European workshops for young astronomers. These included various aspects of effective scientific writing and publication, communicating by graphics, astro-ph, how to communicate with referees, as well as ethical aspects. Christian Sterken is the leader of the annual A&A workshops and author/editor of several books on scientific writing. |
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"The Most Massive Galaxies and Black Holes"
Empirical scaling relationships between massive galaxies and their central
black holes suggest an evolutionary connection between black hole growth
and the build-up of spheroidal stellar systems. Upon deeper inspection,
however, a variety of scenarios are required to explain the full range of
galaxy properties and black hole masses. I will discuss possible assembly
scenarios for the most massive elliptical galaxies and implications for
the Universe's the most massive black holes. New measurements of black
hole masses in Brightest Cluster Galaxies suggest that these objects have
large intrinsic scatter in black hole mass, rather than the tight
relationship between stellar luminosity and black hole mass expected from
successive hierarchical mergers. Some scatter may arise from the early
growth of 10^9 and 10^10 solar-mass black holes, as indicated by the most
powerful high-redshift quasars. |
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"Watching Galaxy Evolution in High Definition"
As Einstein predicted, mass deflects light. In hundreds of known cases, "gravitational lenses" have deflected, distorted, and amplified images of galaxies or quasars behind them. As such, gravitational lensing is a way to "cheat" at studying how galaxies evolve, because lensing can magnify galaxies by factors of 10 - 100 times, transforming them from objects we can barely detect to bright objects we can study in detail. I'll summarize new results from a comprehensive program, using multi-wavelength, high-quality spectroscopy, to study how galaxies formed stars at redshifts of 1 - 3, the epoch when most of the Universe's stars were formed. |
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"New Results from the South Pole Telescope"
The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-meter diameter, millimeter-wave
telescope operating at the South Pole in Antarctica. The initial
survey, which covers 2500 square degrees at bands centered at 1.4,
2.0, and 3.2 mm with arc-minute resolution, will finish in November
2011. I will present a number of recent and upcoming results from the
SPT: measurements of the power spectra of primary and secondary CMB
anisotropies; a measurement of the gravitational lensing of the CMB;
and a catalog of massive, high-redshift galaxy clusters selected by
their Sunyaev-Zel'dovich signature. These measurements probe a number
of cosmological and astrophysical topics, including the effective
number of neutrinos during recombination at z~1000, the emission from
star-forming galaxies at z~4, and the amplitude of matter fluctuations
at z~1. I will summarize future prospects for the SPT, including
SPTpol, a new polarization-sensitive camera scheduled to be installed
in early 2012. |
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"The Mass Assembly History of Black Holes in the Universe"
Supermassive black holes are ubiquitous locally. Every
nearby galaxy including our own appears to harbor one in its
nucleus. One of the key challenges is to understand how black
holes assemble over cosmic time given that galaxies merge and
grow. The current state of our knowledge about the formation
of the first black hole seeds, their galaxy merger driven mass
growth history and observational signatures thereof will be
presented. |
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"Cosmology without Cosmic Variance"
The acceleration of the Hubble expansion may be due to the failure of General Relativity to explain gravity on cosmological scales. This can be tested by measuring the gravitational growth of the largest structures, 100 Mpc or larger. I will review some past approaches to measuring growth using galaxy redshift surveys, then describe a new proposal to combine galaxy redshift and weak gravitational lensing surveys to yield much stronger growth tests. The combined surveys can, in principle, attain unlimited precision with a finite survey of the sky, breaking the "cosmic variance" limits. |
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"Giant Gamma-ray Bubbles in the Inner Galaxy: AGN Activity or Bipolar Galactic Wind?"
I will discuss our discovery of the giant gamma-ray bubbles
in the inner Galaxy observed by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
(http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.5480)
and show that these are associated with the features we have
called the "Fermi haze" and "WMAP haze" in the past. The bubbles
have sharp edges, suggesting a transient event caused by a huge energy
injection in the Galactic center in the last 1-10 Myr, e.g. a BH
accretion event or a nuclear starburst. I will also present evidence for a
cocoon-like structure in the southern bubble, and a linear feature
bisecting it. |
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