<p>Dust plays an important role in planet formation as they grow from micron sized grains to over Mm sized planets. The intermediate stage, to form km-sized planetesimals from mm-cm sized dust particles, has been found to be difficult. These mm-cm sized dust particles frequently distribute in ring-like structures in protoplanetary disks as revealed in ALMA observations. Here, I present a series of...</p>
<p>Completing the census of active galactic nuclei (AGN) activity is the key to study the build-up of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and understand their relations with the host galaxy properties. Nevertheless, many AGNs are obscured by dust and gas, making the identification of such systems a challenging task even today. In this talk, I will present the first results on the AGN identifications ...</p>
<p>The Cosmological Principle (CP) was a major achievement of modern cosmology to turn qualitative statements into quantitative ones. It makes the strong assumption that space is globally homogeneous and isotropic. By doing so, it reduces Einstein’s Field Equations to provide highly symmetric cosmological models. The latter then enable us to interpret a very sparse amount of data and put them int...</p>
<p>The 4-m Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (4MOST) is one of the ESO community survey with a large field-of-view to survey the southern sky in a few years, delivering spectra for ≥25 million objects over ≥15 000 square degrees in R~6000 and R~20000. 4MOST is currently in its manufacturing, assembly, integration and test phase with an expected start of full science operations within a year. ...</p>
<p>The bar of the Galaxy is believed to slow down. We use an axisymmetric background potential plus a central bar model to perform the test particle simulations in order to investigate the possible origin of the phase space spirals and the thin-disc-like low-metallicity stars (VMPs). The Gaia data reveal a two-armed phase spiral pattern in the local plane inside the solar radius. On the contrary,...</p>
<p>The Merian survey is an ongoing medium-band imaging survey on the CTIO 4-meter Blanco telescope. With two new medium-band filters on DECam, we expect to detect ~100,000 star-forming dwarf galaxies at z~0.1 in the HSC-SSP wide field (~800 deg^2), aiming to characterize dark matter halo and stellar feedback in dwarf galaxies. The Merian survey will allow us to measure the full dark matter profile...</p>
<p>Dwarf galaxies provide rich constraints on galaxy formation, reionization, and the nature of dark matter. However, flexible models of their star formation histories in a cosmological context are lacking. We introduce a novel framework for connecting dwarf galaxy dark matter assemblies and star formation histories based on the empirical model UniverseMachine (UM). Our framework is flexible, such...</p>
<p>The early evolution of the black hole mass function (BHMF) and quasar luminosity function (QLF) encodes key information on the physics determining the radiative and accretion processes of black holes (BHs) growing in high-redshift galaxies. Starting from the formation of seed BHs as their parent halos evolve, we study primordial gas collapse in the biased quasar host halos, computing gas chemic...</p>
<p>Weak gravitational lensing imprints a coherent distortion onto the observed shapes of distant galaxies. At the image level, this gravitational shear degenerates with the intrinsic shape of galaxies, and the weak lensing signal-to-noise from an individual galaxy is of order 0.01. I will describe Kinematic Lensing, a new technique combining imaging and galaxy kinematics to measure weak lensing wi...</p>
<p>While the exoplanetary field is replete with remarkable discoveries, perhaps the two most intriguing findings have been the detection of hot Jupiters – giant planets orbiting perilously close to their parent stars, and the startling abundance of super-Earths. The mere existence of these worlds was wholly unpredicted based on the expectations that were gleaned from centuries of observation of o...</p>