Today was the first day of the Galaxy Mergers: From the Local Universe to the Red Sequence meeting at STScI. The many very good talks today included one by Schiavon (Virginia) in which he did very detailed analyses of the mean galaxy spectra we produced for red galaxies in this paper. He finds non-trivial age and metallicity variations with galaxy mass and environment, as we expected (but were unable to do ourselves, since models are complicated).
Bell (MPIA) argued that any galaxy evolution scenario that cannot be ruled out observationally at the order-of-magnitude level is, by definition, plausible. This position is ascetic in its conservatism, but I love it.
Fall (STScI) showed evidence that the formation of star clusters is very regular (statistically) and depends primarily on the local (two-dimensional, don't ask me why) gas density. He noted a conspiracy that the mass function happens to be very similar to the luminosity function; this is not generic for sources like these because their luminosities change very quickly with time, as I wrote once in this paper. I love a conference that gives me opportunities like this to toot my own horn!
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