I’m here for the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), which started last night with a kick-off event. In my posts on AAS, I will report on some of the talks I’ve attended. Most of them will be on exoplanets, since this is the field I am beginning research in.
The current hierarchical theory for galaxy formation — in which larger galaxies are built up from smaller building blocks and dark matter dominates — is well studied and reasonably well accepted. The book is still far from closed, however.
Polarimetry is one of the handful of fundamental methods used to study incoming radiation and can provide substantial clues to the nature of the source. Polarimetry is used to extract information such as the strength of magnetic fields in the interstellar medium (ISM), provide evidence for inflation by observations of the CMB polarization, and motivate a unified model for active galactic nuclei (AGN).
In this paper, Szabó and Kiss compared the planetary parameters of 106 transiting exoplanets to look for clusters of planets in plots of mass versus radius, period versus radius, and other combinations of parameters.
Studying galaxies at high redshift helps us to understand how galaxies formed and evolved; in particular, astronomers are interested in the rates of star formation in galaxies and how these rates change with time.