The annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society is happening this week. This year, I am not only a participant and speaker (two talks, one on Tuesday in S10, the other on Wednesday in S7). No, I am also chair of the SOC organizing one of the two-day symposia: S11 – The Local Group in Context: Galaxies in the Local Volume as a Testbed of Cosmology. It will take place on Thursday, July 2 and Friday, July 3, and consists of a total of six 1.5h sessions, a total of 30 talks and 10 ePosters.

When I had applied for this opportunity with the concept for this Symposium, last year and way before anyone had heard of the Corona virus, the conference was expected to take place in Leiden, The Netherlands. Things came differently, the conference switched to a massive virtual meeting (approaching 1500 participants in total), and also my symposium had to switch to a different format. Despite such challenges, I think we have a highly interesting symposium coming up, and I’m excited about the many excellent speakers who will contribute to our meeting.

Below, you find some more information on our symposium:

Great news from the Hubble Space Telescope: Our observing proposal “Andromeda and the Seven Dwarfs: M31 Mass, Satellite Orbits, and the Nature of the Satellite Plane”, was awarded observing time. The proposal is lead by Tony Sohn and is part of the HSTPROMO collaboration. For a whopping 48 orbits, the Space Telescope will observe our targets (green stars in my figure on the right). These measurements will reveal the proper motions (i.e. motions on the sky) of seven M31 satellite galaxies. This will be the first time that we will be able to study the full 3D motions (and thus 6D phase-space coordinates) of a sample of satellite galaxies outside of our Milky Way. And it will be a first step in determining how dynamically stable (or rotationally supported) the plane of satellite galaxies around Andromeda is.

Some great news today: I am happy to announce that I have been selected as one of the 11 fellows of the Klaus Tschira Boost Fund 2020. It is an honor to be included in such a group of amazing scientists (read about the other new fellows here), and I am grateful to be given this opportunity by German Scholars Organization and of course the Klaus Tschira Stiftung (check out their press release, German only).

The funding will support my research into phase-space correlations of satellite galaxies and the nature of Dark Matter. Among other things, I am especially excited that it will also allow me to organize a small, interdisciplinary hackathon-style workshop in late 2021 or early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.

Update: The AIP has also issued a press release about this, in German and English.

I’ll be giving a public talk in Potsdam this Thursday about my field of research, titled “Dark Matter and the Dance of Dwarf Galaxies”. It is part of our institute’s public outreach series Babelsberger Sternennächte (Babelsberg Starry Nights).

When: Thursday, January 16, 2020. At 7:15 pm.

Where: Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik, An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam

The talk is free, but it will be in German.

For more details follow this link.

Today my newest first-author paper appeared on the arXiv. It was recently accepted for publication in MNRAS. In it, I revisit the orbital alignment of the 11 classical satellite galaxies with their spatial distribution, the disk (or plane) of satellite galaxies. Gaia DR2 provided us with an entirely independent data set to compare with previous proper motion measurements that were based on ground-based observations or Hubble Space Telescope data. It turns out that the new Gaia data strikingly confirms our previous findings: the majority of the 11 classical (i.e. brightest) Milky Way satellite galaxies co-orbits within the plane defined by their positions. Combining the best-available proper motions from the different sources for each of the satellites even reveals a tighter clustering of their orbital poles (= directions of angular momentum around the Milky Way) than ever seen before. This is in line with a strong underlying correlation that becomes more and more apparent as measurement uncertainties are reduced.

We also compare the observed correlation with the state-of-the-art cosmological simulation IllustrisTNG, and find that similarly correlated satellite systems are exceedingly rare in this ΛCDM universe. The Planes of Satellite Galaxies Problem thus becomes even more severe with the addition of this new data.

If you don’t want to read the full 20-page paper, you can find a summary of our main findings in my corresponding Twitter thread.

Together with a fellow alumna of the German Scholar Association Leadership Academy, I am organizing a workshop on mental health and time management, lead by two coaches who are experts on these topics. The one-day workshop is primarily aimed at junior researchers in Berlin and Brandenburg (PhD students, postdocs, junior group leaders). We successfully obtained full funding, so we can offer the workshop air no cost to the participants (and it includes coffee, snacks, and a lunch).

Time: Saturday, October 26, 9:00 – 17:00

Place: BlauArt Tagungshaus, Potsdam

Cost: free!

See the flyer for more information, and sign up by contacting me or via our signup form.