SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT - OATS-DAUT SEMINAR - Wednesday Oct. 10th at 12:00 noon (Villa Bazzoni)

[Gabriella Schiulaz]

I announce you this week's seminar:

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                OATS-DAUT SEMINAR 
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Speaker: François Leblanc (Service d'Aèronomie-CNRS-IPSL, Verrières-le-Buisson) 

Title: Mercury's atmosphere 

Date: Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 
Time: 12:00 
Venue: Villa Bazzoni (Via Bazzoni, 2)

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Abstract: MESSENGER is a US discovery mission that has been launched towards Mercury in August 2004 and will make its first flyby of Mercury in January 2008 for an orbit insertion in 2011. In the same time, the European SA is preparing Bepi Colombo a corner stone mission in collaboration with the Japan to be launched in August 2013 for an insertion around Mercury in 2019. Before these two missions, only one spacecraft, Mariner 10, made three flybys of Mercury 30 years ago. Mariner 10 has in particular revealed the unexpected presence of an intrinsic magnetic field and highlighted the presence of a thin atmosphere. Almost 10 years after Mariner 10 flybys, ground based observations have shown the possibility to probe Mercury's atmosphere from Earth. In 2001, the University of Padova has started a long term program of observations of this atmosphere using the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo and SARG an echelle spectrograph that we have later extended to the French-Italian solar telescope Themis as well as to international campaign. In this presentation, I will summarize the state of the art of our understanding of Mercury's atmosphere and the goals and achievements of my collaboration with the University of Padova. 
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Next week's seminar (please note day and time):

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JOINT DAUT-ICTP-OATS-SISSA COLLOQUIUM 
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Speaker: Rachel Somerville (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy - Heidelberg) 

Title: AGN feedback: Where, When, and How?

Date: Thursday, October 18th, 2007 
Time: 16:00 
Venue: Villa Bazzoni 

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Abstract: 
It has become increasingly clear that 'standard' models of galaxy formation set within the hierarchical Cold Dark Matter paradigm fail to reproduce observed galaxy properties in several important ways. The energy released by accretion onto supermassive black holes in galaxies is a promising new ingredient that could solve many of these problems. I will discuss the physical mechanisms whereby AGN are thought to be able to couple with their surroundings, and assess the feasibility of this proposal from the standpoint of empirical energy constraints from observations. Then, I will present new observational results on the environment and redshift dependence of quenched galaxies (the "victims") -- as well as of the smoking guns (the AGN themselves), and compare these with predictions from semi-analytic models from several different groups. 
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For additional information on scheduled OAT seminars see:
http://adlibitum.oats.inaf.it/seminari/


Gabriella Schiulaz
segreteria OAT
Phone: 040-3199241
schiulaz at oats.inaf.it
segreteria at oats.inaf.it