Recent Talks

List of all the talks in the archive, sorted by date.


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Thursday March 19, 2009
Dr. Fernando Comerón
European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany

Abstract

Most studies of the stellar and substellar populations of star forming regions rely on the identification of the signatures of accretion, outflows, circumstellar dust, or activity characteristic of the early stages of stellar evolution. However, the decay of these observational signatures with time limits our ability to understand the complete star forming history of young aggregates, and to obtain unbiased samples of young stellar objects at different stages of disk evolution. I will present the results of a wide-area study of the stellar population of selected clouds in the nearby Lupus star forming region, initially defined to complement the data obtained by the Spitzer Space Observatory Legacy Program “From molecular cores to planet-forming disks”. When combined with 2MASS photometry, our data allow us to fit the spectral energy distributions of well over 150,000 sources seen in that direction, and to identify possible new members based on their photospheric fluxes alone, with independence of the display of signposts of youth. In this way we identify a very clear signature of the existence of a surprisingly numerous and thus far unrecognized population of cool members of Lupus 1 and 3, which is absent from Lupus 4.
The approximately 130 new members that we identify show that Lupus 1 and 3 have been forming low mass stars in numbers comparable to, or even exceeding in Lupus 1, those revealed by recent sensitive surveys based on the signposts of youth. We hypothesize on several possibilities for the origin of this population that may account for its puzzling properties of general lack of disks, coevality with the disk-bearing population, and preferential off-cloud location, which hint at a picture more complex and interesting than the quiescent formation inside dense molecular clouds.

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Thursday March 19, 2009
Mr. Ruymán Azzollini
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain; Instituto de Estructura de la Materia, CSIC, Spain

Abstract


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Wednesday March 18, 2009
Mr. Ruymán Azzollini.
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain; Instituto de Estructura de la Materia, CSIC, Spain

Abstract


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Wednesday March 18, 2009
Dr. Ana Chies Santos
Astronomical Institute Utrecht, the Netherlands

Abstract

The colour distribution of globular cluster (GC) systems in the majority of galaxies is bi/multimodal in optical colours. It is widely accepted that multiple populations differing in metallicity exist implying different mechanisms/epochs of star formation, with small age differences still being allowed due to the large current uncertainties. Recently Yoon, Yi and Lee (2006) challenged this interpretation stating that the metallicity bimodality is an artifact of the horizontal branch (HB) morphologies that can transform a unimodal metallicity distribution in a bimodal (optical) colour distribution. The combination of optical and near-infrared (NIR) colours can in principal break the age/metallicity degeneracy inherent in optical colours alone, allowing age estimates for a large sample of GCs possible at the same time. It has been shown that the colours that best represent the true metallicity distributions are the combination of optical and NIR (eg. Puzia et al. 2002, Cantiello & Blakeslee 2007). Therefore studying GCs in the NIR is crucial to reveal their true metallicity distributions. We are currently building a homogeneous optical/NIR data set of GC systems in a large sample of elliptical and lenticular galaxies. I will present the sample, an attempt to estimate overall ages and metallicities for the GC systems and the optical/NIR colour distributions.

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Wednesday March 18, 2009
Mr. Ruymán Azzollini
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain; Instituto de Estructura de la Materia, CSIC, Spain

Abstract


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Tuesday March 17, 2009
Mr. Jorge Pérez Prieto
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain

Abstract


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Tuesday March 17, 2009
Mr. Jorge Pérez Prieto
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain

Abstract


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Monday March 16, 2009
Mr. Jorge Pérez Prieto
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain

Abstract


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Monday March 16, 2009
Mr. Jorge Pérez Prieto
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain

Abstract


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Thursday March 12, 2009
Dr. Nick Scoville
California Institute of Technology, USA

Abstract

The COSMOS survey is the largest high redshift galaxy evolution survey ever done -- imaging 2 square degrees with all major space-based and ground based observatories. I will describe the key data in the survey and then present recent results on large-scale structures, the dark matter distributions and galaxy evolution.