Recent Talks

Comets may have played an important role in depositing the organic matter that, between 4,6 and 3,6 billion of years ago, allowed the formation of life on the primordial Earth. Nowadays, many complex organic molecules are routinely observed in the gaseous component of the comae by radio and near-IR observations. However a large quantity of organic matter may be under the form of solid, either as organic grains or organics embedded in silicate grains. The Giotto mission to the 1P/Halley comet revealed for the first time the in-situ presence of organic grains, that accounted for almost 50% of the mass of organic matter in its coma. Remote detection of these organic grains in other comets is very difficult because they rapidly sublimate under the solar radiation and their spectroscopic signatures are hidden within those of the refractory cometary dust. In this talk I will give a short review on the organic matter in comets, I will describe a method for detecting organic grains in comets and I will present recent results.

I will review the status of our understanding of galaxy formation in the prevailing cold dark matter paradigm. After reviewing the successes and failures of the most natural predictions of this scenario I will focus on the consequences of two of its main predictions: the presence of large numbers of low-mass dark matter halos and the prevalence of accretion events during the formation of normal galaxies. In particular, I will discuss the interpretation of the recent discovery of a population of ultra-faint galaxies in the Local Group, and its relation to the profuse cold dark matter substructure expected in the Galactic halo. I will also discuss the importance that accretion events might have had in shaping not only the stellar halo but also the disk component(s) of the Milky Way.

We present a detailed study of the lenticular galaxy NGC 1023 kinematics. To perform this analysis we use planetary nebulae (PNe). which can be observed in the faint outer regions of the galaxy, where traces of the galaxy past history are clearly recorded. If the circular speed is equal or lower than the stars velocity dispersion, the system is hot and it is the result of a minor merger. Otherwise, if the stellar motions are rotation dominated at large radii, a spiral galaxy is the progenitor of the lenticular. A first attempt at such an analysis was undertaken by Noordermeer et al. (2008), who found that the S0 system NGC 1023 has very peculiar kinematics in its disk, which do not seem to be consistent with either of the above scenarios. In this paper we show that that result was largely due to a contamination of the disk kinematics by stars belonging to the spheroidal component or accreted from the small companion. We present a new method based on a more sophisticated maximum-likelihood analysis that uses a full two-dimensional disk/spheroid decomposition to solve simultaneously for both disk and spheroid kinematics. This analysis reveal that NGC1023 has the kinematics expected for a stripped spiral galaxy.

In the Λ-CDM galaxy formation paradigm, the star formation history of a galaxy is coupled to the total mass of its dark matter halo through processes like galaxy-galaxy merging, satellite accretion, and gas retention. Globular cluster formation is known to coincide with strong star formation events in the early Universe. To develop an accurate model of galaxy formation, the relationship between such systems and their hosting dark matter halos must be understood. Employing weak gravitational lensing galaxy mass analysis, we have discovered that the number of globular clusters in a given galaxy is directly proportional to its total dark matter halo mass. This result holds in both dwarf and giant ellipticals, spirals and in all types of galaxy environments. I will present these observations and initiate a discussion on the implications for scenarios of globular cluster system formation and evolution.