Our new paper “Co-orbiting satellite galaxy structures are still in conflict with the distribution of primordial dwarf galaxies” has been accepted a few weeks ago, and now we have finally made the preprint available here.

The reason for the delay was that we had to prepare and coordinate several press releases related to the paper. These appear today:

Case Western Reserve University (me): “Nearby satellite galaxies don’t fit standard model”

Rochester Institute of Technology (David Merritt): “Map of universe questioned; dwarf galaxies don’t fit standard model”

Swinburne University of Technology (Duncan Forbes): “Nearby satellite galaxies challenge standard model of galaxy formation”

Australian National University (Helmut Jerjen): “Milky Way debris came from galaxy collision”

University of Vienna (Gerhard Hensler): “Neues ‘Geburtsszenario’ für Satellitengalaxien” (in German)

After eight busy month in Cleveland, I’ll be traveling for four weeks in May and June:

May 26, 27 and 30: Visiting the AIfA/HISKP, Uni Bonn, Germany. Talk on Friday, May 30, in Pavel Kroupa’s SPODYR Group.

June 2 – 6: Conference “MODEST 14  The dance of stars: dense stellar systems from infant to old” in Bad Honnef, Germany. Talk on Friday, June 6.

June 10 – 13: Visiting the Observatoire de Strasboug, France, in particular Benoit Famaey. Short talk in the Galaxy Lunch seminar on Thursday, June 12.

June 15 – 18: Visiting the Institute for Astrophysics, University of Vienna, Austria. Colloquium talk on Monday, June 16.

Today my most-recent paper became available as a preprint on the arXiv: “Perseus I and the NGC 3109 association in the context of the Local Group dwarf galaxy structures“, by myself and Stacy McGaugh.

In it we investigate the alignment of the recently discovered dwarf galaxy Perseus I with the other dwarf galaxy structures in the Local Group (extending this previous paper of mine), we predict the velocity dispersion of the isolated dSph galaxies in the Local Group and study the NGC 3109 association. We also identify a new potential problem for LCDM cosmology, which we term the ‘overabundant backsplash problem’.

Read it on our SciLogs.com blog The Dark Matter Crisis: “LUX: Results from another direct (non-)detection experiment for Dark Matter“.

The last months have been very busy ones for me. Not only did I write two papers (on the structure of the Local Group and the anisotropy of the Milky Way satellites) and gave talks at two conferences (one very nice one about Small Stellar Systems in Prato, Italy, and another one on Dark Matter on galaxy scales in Monterey, CA, USA), I also finished writing and have handed in my thesis (the date for the defense is not fixed yet, but I hope it will happen in the next month).

One of the papers is accepted now, and this gives me a reason to finally update the website again. There are some even more important updates to come soon, too, so stay tuned.

Today, the preprint of a new paper I co-authored appeared on the arXiv. I has the rather long title “The vast thin plane of M31 co-rotating dwarfs: an additional fossil signature of the M31 merger and of its considerable impact in the whole Local Group“, which summarizes its content pretty well. The lead-authors are François Hammer, Yanbin Yang and Sylvain Fouquet, whom I have recently visited in Paris. Have a look!