Since I just got back from the From Dark Matter to Galaxies conference in Xi’an, China, I figured I’d tell you about it. I took this photo in front of our conference venue:

Xi’an is an important historical place, since it was one of the ancient capitals of the country (not just the Shaanxi province) and dates back to the 11th century BCE, during the Zhou dynasty. Xi’an is also the home of the terra cotta warriors, horses, and chariots, which (along with a mausoleum) were constructed during the reign of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. The terra cotta warriers were first discovered in 1974 by local farmers when they were digging a well, and they are still being painstakingly excavated today.

Back to the conference. This was the 10th Sino-German Workshop in Galaxy Formation and Cosmology, organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Gesellschaft and especially by my friends and colleagues Kang Xi and Andrea Macciò. This one was a very international conference, with people coming from Japan, Korea, Iran, Mexico, US, UK, Italy, Austria, Australia, and other places.

Now scientific conferences aren’t really political exactly, unlike other things I’ve written about on this blog, though this conference did include debates about the nature of dark matter particles and perspectives on dark energy (which is relevant to this post). I should be clear that dark matter is much better understood and determined by observations though, such as by measurements of galaxy rotation curves, masses of galaxy clusters, gravitational lensing, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation, etc. (On a historical note, one conference speaker mentioned that the CMB was first discovered fifty years ago, on 20 May 1964, by Penzias and Wilson, who later won the Nobel Prize.) In contrast, the constraints on dark energy (and therefore our understanding of it) are currently rather limited.

the main points

I’ll start with the main points and results people presented at the conference. First, I thought there were some interesting and controversial talks about proposed dark matter (DM) particles and alternate dark energy cosmologies. (The currently favored view or standard “paradigm” is ΛCDM, or cold dark matter with a cosmological constant.) People are considering various cold dark matter particles (WIMPS, axions), warm dark matter (sterile neutrino), and self-interacting dark matter. (Warm dark matter refers to particles with a longer free-streaming length than CDM, which results in the same large-scale structure but in different small-scale behavior such as cored density profiles of dark matter haloes.) The jury is still out, as they say, about which kind of particle makes up the bulk of the dark matter in the universe. There were interesting talks on these subjects by Fabio Fontanot, Veronica Lora, Liang Gao, and others.

Second, people showed impressive results on simulations and observations of our Milky Way (MW) galaxy the “Local Group”, which includes the dwarf galaxy satellites of the MW and the Andromeda (M31) galaxy’s system. Astrophysicists are studying the abundance, mass, alignment of satellite galaxies as well as the structure and stellar populations of the MW. Some of these analyses can even be used to tell us something about dark matter and cosmology, because once we know the MW dark matter halo’s mass, we can predict the number and masses of the satellites based on a CDM or WDM. (Current constraints put the MW halo’s mass at about one to two trillion solar masses.) There were some interesting debates between Carlos Frenk, Aldo Rodriguez-Puebla, and others about this.

The third subject many people discussed involves models, and observations of the large-scale structure of the universe and the formation and evolution of galaxies. There are many statistical methods to probe large-scale structure (LSS), but there is still a relatively wide range of model predictions and observational measurements at high redshift, allowing for different interpretations of galaxy evolution. In addition, simulations are making progress in producing realistic disk and elliptical galaxies, though different types of simulations disagree about the detailed physical processes (such as the treatment of star formation and stellar winds) that are implemented in them.

There were many interesting talks, including reviews by Rashid Sunyaev (famous for the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect), Houjun Mo, Joachim Wambsganss, Eva Grebel, Volker Springel, Darren Croton, and others. Mo spoke about impressive work on reconstructing the density field of the local universe, Springel spoke about the Illustris simulation, and Wambsganss gave a nice historical review of studies of gravitational lensing. I won’t give more details about the talks here unless people express interest in learning more about them.

my own work

In my unbiased opinion, one of the best talks was my own, which was titled “Testing Galaxy Formation with Clustering Statistics and ΛCDM Halo Models at 0<z<1.” (My slides are available here, if you’re interested.) I spoke about work-in-progress as well as results in this paper and this one. The former included a model of the observed LSS of galaxies, and you can see a slice from the modeled catalog in this figure:

I also talked about galaxy clustering statistics, which are among the best methods for analyzing LSS and for bridging between the observational surveys of galaxies and numerical simulations of dark matter particles, whose behavior can be predicted based on knowledge of cosmology and gravity. I’m currently applying a particular set of models to measurements of galaxy clustering out to redshift z=1 and beyond, which includes about the last eight billion years of cosmic time. I hope that these new results (which aren’t published yet) will tell us more about how galaxies evolve within the “cosmic web” and about how galaxy growth is related to the assembly of dark matter haloes.