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!

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.