Recent Talks

While ultraluminous supersoft X-ray sources (ULSs) bear features for intermediate mass black holes or very massive white dwarfs possibly close to Chandrasekhar mass limit, our recent discovery of processing relativistic baryonic jets from a prototype ULS in M81 demonstrate that they are not IMBHs or WDs, but black holes accreting at super-Eddington rates. This discovery strengthens the recent ideas that ULXs are stellar black holes with supercritical accretion, as demonstrated in the case of M101 ULX-1, and provides a vivid manifestation of what happens when a black hole devours too much, that is, it will generate thick disk winds and fire out sub-relativistic baryonic jets along the funnel as predicted by recent numerical simulations. 

The National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) was officially founded in April 2001 through the merger of several unites and was headquartered in Beijing, which was formerly called the Beijing Astronomical Observatory established in 1958. Aiming at the forefront of astronomical science, NAOC conducts cutting-edge astronomical studies, operates major national facilities and develops state-of-the-art technological innovations in China.  NAOC is one of the most important institutes for Astronomy in　Chinese Academy of Sciences　(CAS)  system, as well as in the whole country. I will briefly introduce NAOC, including the facilities, research and the international collaborations.

 In this talk I will present the our work on an exotic group  
of evolved objects: post-AGB and post-RGB stars and the excellent  
constraints they provide for single and binary star evolution and  
nucleosynthesis. These objects have also revealed new evolutionary  
channels and AGB nucleosynthesis which is vital for understanding the  
complex chemical evolution of our Galaxy as well as external galaxies.

We propose ground-based monitoring system for atmospheric water vapor based on wide-range spectra at 20 – 30 GHz and 50 – 60 GHz ranges. It  observes in these microwave range and estimates the thermodynamic environments in the atmosphere. These information can determine short-term forecasting and now casting of severe storms. Our system can catch rapid increase of water vapor before clouds generation. We employ cold receiver system to achieve a system temperature below the atmospheric radiations. We will present overview of the system, including status of development, and results of long-term monitoring in outside.

The disc of galaxies is made of the superposition of a thin and a thick disc. Thick discs are seen in edge-on galaxies as excesses of light a few thin disc scale-heights above the mid-plane. Star formation occurs in the thin discs whereas thick discs are made of old stars. The formation mechanisms of thick discs are under debate. Thick discs might have formed either at high redshift on a short time-scale or might have been built slowly over the cosmic time. They may have an internal or an external origin. To solve the issue of the thick disc origin we studied the kinematics and the stellar populations of the nearby edge-on galaxies ESO 533-4 and ESO 243-49. We present the first Integral Field Unit (IFU) spectroscopy works with enough depth and quality to study the thick discs. This was done with VIMOS@VLT and MUSE@VLT.

Our results point that thick discs formed in a relatively short event at high redshift and that the thin disc has formed afterwards within it. We also find that the thick disc stars have an internal origin as opposed to have their stars accreted during encounters. The work regarding ESO 533-4 has recently been published in Comer?n et al. 2015, A&A, 584, 34.

Stars originate by the gravitational collapse of a turbulent molecular cloud of a diffuse medium, and
are often observed to form clusters. Stellar clusters therefore play an important role in our
understanding of star formation and of the dynamical processes at play. However, investigating the
cluster formation is difficult because the density of the molecular cloud undergoes a change of
many orders of magnitude. Hierarchical-step approaches to decompose the problem into different
stages are therefore required, as well as reliable assumptions on the initial conditions in the clouds.
In this talk I will report for the first time the use of the full potential of NASA Kepler
asteroseismic observations coupled with 3D numerical simulations, to put strong constraints on the
early formation stages of old open clusters. Thanks to a Bayesian peak bagging analysis of about 50
red giant members of NGC 6791 and NGC 6819, the two most populated open clusters observed
in the nominal Kepler mission, I derive a complete set of detailed oscillation mode properties for
each star, with thousands of oscillation modes characterized. I therefore show how these
asteroseismic properties lead to a discovery about the rotation history of stellar clusters. Finally,
the observational findings will be compared with hydrodynamical simulations for stellar cluster
formation to constrain the physical processes of turbulence, rotation, and magnetic fields that are
in action during the collapse of the progenitor cloud into a proto-cluster.

Current planet formation theories are bound to comply with the observational constraint that protoplanetary disks have lifetime of ~3 Myr. This timescale is mostly based on spectroscopic studies of objects accreting matter from a circumstellar disk around pre-main sequence stars (PMS) located in low-density, nearby (d<1-2kpc) star forming regions. These objects do not reflect the conditions in place in the massive starburst clusters where most of star formation occurs in the universe. Using a new robust method to indentify PMS objects through their photometric excess in the Halpha band, we have studied with the HST and ground based facilities the PMS population several starburst clusters, namely NGC3603 in the Milky Way and several clusters in the Carina Nebula,  30 Doradus and the surrounding regions in the Large Magellanic Cloud and NGC 346 and NGC 602 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. We found a wide spread of ages (0.5 to 20 Myr) for PMS stars, clearly showing that accretion from circumstellar disks is still going on well past 10 Myr. This finding challenges our present understanding of protoplanetary disk evolution, and can imply a new scenario for the planet formation mechanism and of star clusters formation in general. Based on these results we were recently granted 175hr with OmegaCAM at the VST to carry out a deep optical wide field survey of nearby (<3kpc) star forming regions. These observations will provide physical parameters (including mass accretion rates) for over 10000 PMS stars and will establish whether the long timescales of circumstellar discs are common.