It is a great honor and pleasure to be hosting a symposium by the International Astronomical Union in Potsdam. IAUS 379 is titled “Dynamical Masses of Local Group Galaxies”, and will bring 150 participants to Potsdam, 85% of those in person but others remotely.  This conference has been in the making for a year, and I’ve been heavily involved as both a co-chair of the Scientific Organizing Committee (SOC) and the Local Organizing Committee (LOC), so it took up a big chunk of my time. But now that the program is ready, the logistics are prepared, and the details of running the meeting are planned, I am very much looking forward to welcoming many wonderful friends, collaborators, and colleagues for what will be an exciting, interesting, and interactive conference.

Press release by AIP about the symposium: “Galaxies put on the scales at IAU Symposium in Potsdam”

Conference website: https://iaus379.aip.de

My newest paper has now been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics and its preprint is now available on the arXiv. It is titled “The intervelocity of galaxy pairs in ΛCDM – The observed velocity peak at ~130 km/s is not unique to MOND“. In it, we investigate whether the mutual velocity of galaxy pairs shows a peak comparable to that found in observational studies. Such a peak had been explained by the dark matter alternative Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), but whether it is present in cosmological simulations was unclear. I have summarized the background and main results of our paper on Twitter.

The paper is the result of a true team effort by my new research group at the AIP. We had worked on this in a “project-in-a-day” fashion, which turned out to be not only very productive, but also was an excellent team bonding and mentoring technique. In shortYou can read more about that in my Twitter thread.

I feel honored to have been selected as a finalist for the Falling Walls Science Breakthroughs of the Year 2022 in Physical Sciences with my “Cosmic Choreographies” research project studying systems of satellite galaxies, how they compare to cosmological expectations, and whether they challenge our understanding of the composition of the Universe, dark matter, and gravity.

Check out the full list of the 30 finalists in this category here.

Today, another video presentation was posted in the virtual public talk series Babelsberger Sternennächte of the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics, Potsdam (AIP). In this “Kommentarcheck” I answer some of the many great questions and comments – about things like dwarf galaxies, dark matter, and modified gravity – I got after my virtual talk “Dark Matter and the Dance of Dwarf Galaxies” (see here for original post).

Today’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, one of the big German Sunday newspapers, features a whole double page on dark matter. It includes a long article by me on small scale problems of cosmology and planes of satellite galaxies.

Here is a link to the online version of the article: “Brauchen wir Dunkle Materie?“

Nature Astronomy published my comment on why planes of satellite galaxies are a problem for ΛCDM cosmology in their December issue. It is titled “It’s time for some plane speaking”, and part of their new collection on dwarf galaxies. It was a lot of fun to write such an opinion piece style text for a change, instead of the usual, more formal scientific articles.

You can access my article here.

And here’s the collection of articles on dwarfs galaxies. The collection will be further expanded with more articles during the month, and also contains a counter-comment on the satellite planes issue by Mike Boylan-Kolchin.