2006-05-09

dark energy, solar systems, LRG accretion

[I ran out of time for posting yesterday, so this post covers two days.]

Eric Linder (LBL) gave a very nice lunchtime talk on Monday about dark energy, including a classification of most dark energy models (ie, physical models) into freezing and thawing types. He showed that the next generation of experiments (eg, SNAP or JDEM) ought to be able to distinguish these types, although more will probably have to be done to resolve a particular model within the type. In the current experiments, there are large degeneracies still available for the physical properties of the dark matter.

In the afternoon on Monday, Roman Rafikov (CITA) gave a beautiful review of what is known about our own Solar System and other planetary systems, and puzzles about the formation of the planets (and in particular their solid cores). Unfortunately I had to leave before he finished!

Today I basically worked on the big, bright galaxies in SDSS, with conversations with Blanton about sky, and Quintero about presentation, if you will.

In other news, Masjedi has a beautiful result: The mass spectrum of merging events for LRGs. He can show that the mass accretion onto luminous red galaxies is likely dominated by L-star and brighter galaxies, and that LRGs accrete at most tens of percent of their masses since redshift unity. This agrees very nicely with other, less direct measurements, so it is a wonderful and productive result.

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