Seminars and Colloquia at ESO Garching and on the campus

Since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet orbiting a Solar-like star in 1995, exoplanet science has been evolving into a highly dynamic field of modern astrophysics. Today we know more than 4000 exoplanets and thanks to ongoing efforts from the ground and from space this number keeps continuously increasing. While most of the planets have been discovered via indirect techniques, such as the radial velocity and transit techniques, the direct detection of (small, terrestrial) exoplanets will be required in order to test hypotheses concerning exoplanet habitability and the possible existence of bio-signatures in a statistically relevant sample of objects. In this talk, I will briefly review the current state of high-contrast exoplanet imaging today, discuss the challenges that need to be overcome in order to directly take a picture or a spectrum of an exoplanet, and present a way forward, how we will eventually be able to search for indications of biological activity in exoplanet atmospheres around nearby stars.

In this informal discussion, ESO students and fellows will present the Nobel Prizes awarded in 2020.
There will be a short presentation on each prize, focusing on the main results which led to it.
The list of presentations is:

Medicine
Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice
Presentation by Avinash Chaturvedi

Chemistry
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna
Presentation by Rosita Kokotanekova

Literature
Louise Glück
Presentation by Dominika Itrich

Peace
World Food Program
Presentation by Teresa Paneque Carreno

Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson,
Presentation by Samuel Ruthven Ward

Surveys of bright sub-millimetre sources with ALMA have provided the first unbiased view of intense star formation at high redshift and have allowed for detailed studies of their structures and star formation triggers. I will present a detailed analysis of high resolution (0.18") 870um continuum maps of ~150 sub-mm galaxies (SMGs) selected from the ALMA-SCUBA-2 UDS survey. These observations resolve the dust which traces ongoing star formation within the interstellar medium of these galaxies, and typically have infrared light profiles consistent with exponential discs. The profiles also reveal an axis ratio distribution best described by triaxial shapes. This suggests that the sub-millimetre emission is tracing bars, which are funnelling cold gas from the outer part of the galaxies into the centres. Previous studies have suggested that SMGs may be the high-redshift analogs to local merger-dominated ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs). However, these results and other recent studies, suggest that SMGs instead have disc morphologies. This means that ALMA - once again - is revealing important differences between high-redshift SMGs and local ULIRGs.