Aug.4 - Aug.8

Seminar talk

Title: The Advances in mm-VLBI with the Event Horizon Telescope 

Speaker: Rusen Lu (MIT, Haystack Observatory)

Time: Tuesday , 10:00am,August 5

Location: 3rd floor conference room

Abstract: The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a global collaboration to assemble an array of millimeter dishes to observe nearby supermassive black holes. The project has made considerable progress in recent years and recent observations have identified Schwarzschild-radius-scale structures around the supermassive black holes in the Galactic center and M87. In this talk, I will introduce the EHT project and present results from recent observations of the Galactic center, M87 and a couple of nearby AGN jets. I will also present some results from VLBI simulations to examine the future imaging capability of jet launch regions and black hole shadow features.

Title: The European-Chinese MESSIER satellite: unveiling galaxy formation

Speaker: David Valls-Gabaud (LERMA, CNRS, Observatoire de Paris)

Time: Wednesday,3:00pm, August 6

Location: the middle conference room

Abstract: MESSIER is a small European-Chinese satellite project aimed at exploring the last remaining niche in observational space: the extremely low surface brightness

universe at UV and optical wavelengths. The two driving science cases target the mildly- and highly non-linear regimes of structure formation to test two key predictions of the LCDM scenario. MESSIER is designed for the detection of the putative large number of satellites orbiting normal galaxies up to some 200 Mpc, and the identification of the filaments of the cosmic web at z=0.65. Many important secondary science cases will result as free by-products and will be discussed, along with the synergies with LAMOST,

Gaia, and EUCLID.