After a temporarily successful attempt by a blogger demanding the discontinuation of our blog “The Dark Matter Crisis” on SciLogs.com, it has now been re-opened. You can read the full story about the incident in the post “The Dark Matter Crisis continues: on the difficulties of communicating controversial science“. It is followed by a guest blog post by cosmologist Scott Dodelson: “Scott Dodelson on dark matter and modified gravity (guest post)“.
Furthermore, for those more interested in actual science, have a look at my blog post “Are there two types of dwarf galaxies in the universe?“, explaining some very exciting recent results concerning dwarf elliptical and tidal dwarf galaxies.

Today a Nature paper by Rodrigo Ibata and collaborators appeared, titled “A vast, thin plane of co-rotating dwarf galaxies orbiting the Andromeda galaxy”. It is extremely relevant for my research (the structure resembles the VPOS around the MW) and therefore has game-changing implications for the research areas of galaxy formation and near-field cosmology. Unfortunately the Nature letter contains only little discussion and interpretation. This is why I’ve written a blog post on this topic, discussing some ideas for the origin of such a structure: “Andromeda’s satellites behave as expected … if they are tidal dwarf galaxies”

One day before the VPOS paper preprint became public on the arXiv, another paper of mine has been accepted by the Monthy Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Its preprint can be downlowaded from astro-ph since Monday:

“Can filamentary accretion explain the orbital poles of the Milky Way satellites?” by M. S. Pawlowski, P. Kroupa, G. Angus, K. S. de Boer, B. Famaey, G. Hensler, 2012, MNRAS, accepted

Today, the preprint of my most recent paper became available on arXiv/astro-ph: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.5176

It is titled “The VPOS: a vast polar structure of satellite galaxies, globular clusters and streams around the Milky Way” and will soon be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The RAS will also publish a press release on this topic today. UPDATE: Here is the press release.

Next Monday I will give a seminar talk at the Observatoire de Paris / GEPI. I’ve been invited to discuss my paper on counter-orbiting tidal debris and will also present the latest results on my extension to the Disc of Satellite galaxies around the MW. The title is “A vast polar structure of satellite galaxies, globular clusters and streams around the Milky Way”. The talk will take place on Monday, Mach 12 at 11h00 in salle 108 at the Communs building of the Meudon site of the Paris observatory.

For more details and the abstract, see the announcement.

The University of Bonn has published a press release on my recent paper. It’s in German and can be found here: http://www3.uni-bonn.de/Pressemitteilungen/216-2011.Die Uni Bonn hat eine Pressemitteilung zu meinem vor kurzem akzeptierten Paper heraus gegeben. Sie kann hier gefunden werden: “Kosmische Geisterfahrer – Astronomen der Universität Bonn entdecken Überreste eines gigantischen Crashs in unserer Milchstraße“.