On Friday, October 9 POSTPONED TO January 8, 2021 at 7:30pm PDT*, I’ll give a public science talk titled: “Dark Matter and the Dance of Dwarf Galaxies”. It is hosted by the Orange County Astronomers, but of course online (via Zoom), and free! Furthermore, I’m really happy to at least virtually return to California and OC (where I spend two+ years as a Hubble Fellow at UC Irvine).

If you’re in a compatible time zone, interested in learning what I’m working on at a general audience level, and don’t have plans for Friday night yet, you can register via this link.

*: Which will be 4:30am for me here in Germany … *yikes*. At least I don’t have to travel.

After a super successful EAS symposium, I am organizing yet another conference session. For a change, this one is not focussed on a specific science topic, but rather is about the way we work in Astronomy and what we might (need to) improve.

Together with Victoria Grinberg (Uni Tübingen) I am organizing a splinter session on “Healthy Careers in Astronomy” on September 23, as part of the German Astronomical Society’s (virtual) annual meeting.  The session aims to start a conversation about stress and mental health in our field, and some of our speakers will also share some resources on how to deal with such problems. We particularly hope that this will contribute to decreasing the stigma around conversations on topics such as mental health, stress management and career anxiety.

The idea for this was born out of the interdisciplinary Mental Health and Time Management workshop I organized in Potsdam in October last year … and a Twitter exchange. Victoria was interested, but too far away to participate in the local workshop. So we briefly discussed whether we might organize something similar for an astronomy audience, which eventually became a successful splinter meeting proposal and resulted in our session … which turned virtual due to the Corona pandemic.

We’re especially grateful to our speakers for agreeing to support this initiative! You can find more details here, and see the schedule below.

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.