Observations show that expanding H ii regions may trigger star formation. We discuss several aspects of this type of star formation, and try to estimate its prevalence. We show how LMC H ii regions may help us to understand what we see in our Galaxy.

I will review our recent analysis of the magnetic properties of the O9IV star HD 57682, using spectropolarimetric observations obtained with ESPaDOnS at the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope within the context of the Magnetism in Massive Stars (MiMeS) Large Program. I discuss our most recent determination of the rotational period from longitudinal magnetic field measurements and Hα variability - the latter obtained from over a decade's worth of professional and amateur spectroscopic observations. Lastly, I will report on our investigation of the magnetic field geometry and the effects of the field on the circumstellar environment.

We have carried out a detailed analysis of stellar properties of bars and bulges of a sample of early-type galaxies. We have also compared the results of the bulge properties with the bulges of a similar sample of unbarred galaxies, deriving the SSP equivalent stellar parameters in the same way as for our sample. We are currently characterising the nebular gas in the bulges of the sample galaxies. We have found differences in the bulge stellar population properties between barred and unbarred galaxies. The bulges of barred galaxies seem to be more metal rich, at a given velocity dispersion (σ), than the bulges of unbarred galaxies, as measured by some metallicity sensitive indices. There are indications that the ratio of relative abundance of alpha-elements with respect to iron, [E/Fe], derived for the bulges of barred galaxies tend to lie above the values of the unbarred galaxies at a given σ. We also find three different types of bars according to their metallicity and age distribution along the radius: 1) Bars with negative metallicity gradients. They show mean young/intermediate population (<2 Gyr), and have amongst the lowest stellar maximum central velocity dispersion of the sample. 2) Bars with null metallicity gradients. These galaxies that do not show any gradient in their metallicity distribution along the bar and have negative age gradients (i.e younger populations at the bar end). 3) Bars with positive metallicity gradients, i.e. more metal rich at the bar ends. These galaxies are predominantly those with higher velocity dispersion and older mean population. We find no significant correlation between the age and metallicity distribution, and bar/galaxy parameters such as the AGN presence, size or the bar strength. From the kinematics, we find that all the galaxies show a disk–like central component. Regarding the ionised gas properties, we find that the nebular metallicity gradients are shallower than the stellar ones, indicating an efficient mixing of the material currently forming. The nebular central metallicities do not show a correlation with the central σ, and, furthermore, in some cases the nebular metallicities are clearly lower than the stellar ones, indicating an external origin for the gas fueling the current star formation. All these results point to a scenario, at least for early-type galaxies, where bars are long-lived and where the formation of the bulge and the bar are closely linked. Later accretion of gas can then be funneled towards the center forming nuclear discs and rings, producing substructures with low level of star formation, but that would not contain enough stars to produce a change in the SSP-equivalent metallicities and [E/Fe].

Radial velocity surveys have discovered over 400 exoplanets. While measuring eccentricities of low-mass planets remains a challenge, giant exoplanets display a broad range of orbital eccentricities. Recently, spectroscopic measurements during transit have demonstrated that the short-period giant planets (“hot-Jupiters”) also display a broad range of orbital inclinations (relative to the rotation axis of the host star). Both properties pose a challenge for simple disk migration models and suggest that late-stage orbital evolution can play an important role in determining the final architecture of planetary systems. One possible formation mechanism for the inclined hot-Jupiters is some form of eccentricity excitation (e.g., planet scattering, secular perturbations due to a distant planet or wide binary) followed tidal circularization. The planet scattering hypothesis also makes predictions for the population of planets at large separations. Recent discoveries of planets on wide orbits via direct imaging and highly anticipated results from upcoming direct imaging campaigns are poised to provide a new type of constraint on planet formation. This proceedings describes recent progress in understanding the formation of giant exoplanets.

The business meeting of Division VI was held on Monday 10 October 2009. Apologies had been received in advance from D Breitschwerdt, P Caselli, G Ferland, M Juvela, S Lizano, M Rozyczka, V Tóth, M Tsuboi, J Yang and B-C Koo.

When consulting detailed photospheric catalogs for solar activity studies spanning long time intervals, solar physicists face multiple limitations in the existing catalogs: finite or fragmented time coverage, limited time overlap between catalogs and even more importantly, a mismatch in contents and conventions. In view of a study of new sunspot-based activity indices, we have conducted a comprehensive survey of existing catalogs.

In a first approach, we illustrate how the information from parallel catalogs can be merged to form a much more comprehensive record of sunspot groups. For this, we use the unique Debrecen Photoheliographic Data (DPD), which is already a composite of several ground observatories and SOHO data, and the USAF/Mount Wilson catalog from the Solar Optical Observing Network (SOON). We also describe our semi-interactive cross-identification method, which was needed to match the non-overlapping solar active region nomenclature, the most critical and subtle step when working with multiple catalogs. This effort, focused here first on the last two solar cycles, should lead to a better central database collecting all available sunspot group parameters to address future solar cycle studies beyond the traditional sunspot index time series Ri.

We used near-IR integral field spectroscopy, obtained with Gemini NIFS and GNIRS integral field units (IFUs), to map the ionized and molecular flux distributions and kinematics in the central few hundreds of parsecs of Seyfert galaxies. We conclude that the molecular gas emission can be considered a tracer of the feeding of the AGN, while the emission of the ionized gas a tracer of its feedback.

We studied the problem of the behavior of the magnetic field in the case of two-layer medium. We included of the meridional circulation in this model and investigated the influence of the meridional circulation on the nature of distribution and configuration of the dynamo-waves.

We propose a modeling study on the formation and evolution of the Circumstellar Envelopes (CSEs) of a sample of selected radio-loud objects, based on an innovative interaction between two codes widely used by the scientific community, but in different fields. CLOUDY (Ferland et al. 1998) is a widely used code to model the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the several objects characterized by clouds of gas heated and ionized by a central object. CosmoMC (Lewis & Bridle 2002) instead is usually used for exploring cosmological parameter space. We investigate here on the exploitation of the sampling performance of the Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) engine of CosmoMC to search for a best fit model of the considered objects through the spectral synthesis capacity of CLOUDY.

During the last business meeting of the WG on PN during the GA09, several topics were addressed. The renovation of the WG members was discussed. We agreed that members will be renewed during the PN IAU symposiums, and that the maximum duration of the term will be 10 years. It was decided that the next IAU PN Symp will be held in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, in 2011. It seemed appropriate to hold the symposium in the Canary Islands in recognition of the new 10.4m GTC telescope recently inaugurated on La Palma and its importance to the field of planetary nebulae.

Recent work has shown a relationship between between the equations of Reduced Magnetohydrodynamics (RMHD), used to model magnetic fusion laboratory experiments, and incompressible magnetoconvection (IMC), employed in the simulation of astrophysical fluid dynamics (AFD), which means that the two systems are mathematically equivalent in certain geometries. Limitations on the modelling of RMHD, which were found over twenty years ago, are reviewed for an AFD audience, together with hitherto unpublished material on the role of finite-time singularities in the discrete equations used to model fluid dynamical systems. Possible implications for turbulence modelling are mentioned.

The Sunrise balloon-borne solar observatory consists of a 1m aperture Gregory telescope, a UV filter imager, an imaging vector polarimeter, an image stabilization system and further infrastructure. The first science flight of Sunrise yielded high-quality data that reveal the structure, dynamics and evolution of solar convection, oscillations and magnetic fields at a resolution of around 100 km in the quiet Sun. Here we describe very briefly the mission and the first results obtained from the Sunrise data, which include a number of discoveries.

We discuss the recent detection of a strong, organized magnetic field in the bright, broad-line B2V star, HD 142184, using the ESPaDOnS spectropolarimeter on the CFHT as part of the Magnetism in Massive Stars (MiMeS) survey. We find a rotational period of 0.50833 days, making it the fastest-rotating, non-degenerate magnetic star ever detected. Like the previous rapid-rotation record holder HR 7355 (also discovered by MiMeS: Oksala et al. 2010, Rivinius et al. 2010), this star shows emission line variability that is diagnostic of a structured magnetosphere.

Protostellar outflows can inject sufficient mass, momentum, and kinetic energy into their parent star-forming clumps to dramatically alter their structure, generate turbulence, and even to disrupt them. Outflows represent the lowest rung on a ‘feedback ladder’ consisting of increasingly powerful mechanisms which kick-in if star formation escalates towards the production of more massive stars, higher efficiency, and larger clusters. Outflow feedback may dominate turbulence generation and cloud disruption on the scale of cluster-forming clumps having dimensions up to a few parsecs. Outflows inject energy and momentum on a wide-range of length-scales from less than 0.01 pc to over 30 pc. However, they fail by several orders of magnitude to inject sufficient momentum and kinetic energy to drive turbulent motions on the size and mass-scales of GMCs. Injection from higher rungs on the feedback ladder or momentum injected by Galactic-scale processes are needed to power the observed turbulence on the 10 to 100 pc scales of GMCs.

Most of jets detected in AGN blazar sources exhibit a morphological structure usually composed by a spatially unresolved core and jet knots receding from it at relativistic velocities. In some cases, the trajectories of the jet components on the plane of the sky seem to be bent, indicating the existence of some kind of acceleration in the respective motion. However, such claims depend strongly on the correct determination of the structural parameters of the jet components, usually obtained from model fitting procedures performed either in the (u,v) or in the image planes. In this work we introduce a new model fitting technique to obtain structural parameters of knots present in VLBI jet images. Our method that is based on the cross-entropy technique minimises an performance function that depends on the sum of the squared residuals obtained from the comparison of an VLBI image and a model image, constructed by summing Ns elliptical Gaussian synthetic sources. We present in this work the cross-entropy model fittings of benchmark images that were built to simulate most of the conditions encountered in typical VLBI images of active galactic nuclei. Besides recovering the parameters of the jet components in all validation tests, our method is able to point out quantitatively the number of the sources present in the image.

Recent observations have revealed two new classes of planetary orbits. Rossiter-Mclaughlin (RM) measurements have revealed hot Jupiters in high-obliquity orbits. In addition, direct-imaging has discovered giant planets at large (~ 100 AU) separations via direct-imaging technique. Simple-minded disk-migration scenarios are inconsistent with the high-inclination (and even retrograde) orbits as seen in recent RM measurements. Furthermore, forming giant planets at large semi-major axis (a) may be challenging in the core-accretion paradigm. We perform many N-body simulations to explore the two above-mentioned orbital architectures. Planet–planet scattering in a multi-planet system can naturally excite orbital inclinations. Planets can also get scattered to large distances. Large-a planetary orbits created from planet–planet scattering are expected to have high eccentricities (e). Theoretical models predict that the observed long-period planets, such as Fomalhaut-b have moderate e ≈ 0.3. Interestingly, these are also in systems with disks. We find that if a massive-enough outer disk is present, a scattered planet may be circularized at large a via dynamical friction from the disk and repeated scattering of the disk particles.

We have found that local galaxies follow a very tight relation between gas metallicity, stellar mass and SFR, suggesting that their evolution is characterized by a long standing equilibrium between gas inflows, outflows and star formation. Surprisingly, even distant galaxies, out to z < 2.5, follow the same relation, suggesting that the same dominant mechanism of galaxy evolution is in place at any epoch, out to z < 2.5. However, by using deep near-IR spectroscopy (probing optical nebular lines at high-z), we find that galaxies at z > 3 deviate from such fundamental relation, by being significantly more metal poor. Spatially resolved metallicity maps of z > 3 disk galaxies reveal that they are characterized by central regions with low metallicity associated with the peak of star formation, indicating that the latter is due to massive inflow of pristine gas that both boosts star formation and dilutes the gas metallicity. Overall these results suggest that the metallicity evolution of galaxies at z > 3 is due to an excess of gas inflow at such early epochs, as expected by some recent models. Finally, we investigate the metallicity of merging systems, both locally and at high-z. By exploiting recent Herschel data, we have found that in these systems the dust content directly measured through the FIR-submm data is much higher than inferred from the metallicity measured through the optical nebular lines. The latter result suggests that, in these heavily obscured systems, optical observations only probe the outer, less enriched regions and are not representative of the bulk of the metal content.

The (near) relativistic electrons, emanating from the solar corona in long-lasting, gradual events, are generally observed at 1 AU as delayed vs the less energetic, type-III beams. The observations are consistent with the delayed electrons being energized along the stretched post-CME coronal field lines, when the tail of an anisotropic seed population, which is injected in conjunction to the observed radioheliograph bursts, interacts with the self-excited whistler waves (bootstrap mechanism). These bursts indicate efficient processes where suprathermal seed electrons are injected as a result of magnetic reconnection at the marginally stable coronal configuration left behind the emerging CME. The dependence of the bootstrap mechanism on the electron injection raises the general question of the MHD description and its deviation over the small electron skin-depth scale. The similarity between MHD and knot theories allows one to characterize any turbulent magnetic configuration through topological invariants, while deviation over electron skin-depth scale, characterized by the generalized vorticity, which is enhanced due to density inhomogeneity, creates the conditions for the potential injection sites.

Division VII provides a forum for astronomers studying the Milky Way Galaxy and its constituents. Several meetings directly relevant to his subject were held at the General Assembly in Rio: IAU Symp. 262 Stellar Populations, IAU Symp. 265 Chemical Abundances in the Universe, IAU Symp. 266 Star Clusters, Joint Discussion 5 Modeling the Milky Way in the Era of Gaia, and Special Session 5 The Galactic Plane. Division VII therefore did not organize a separate science session at Rio, but business meetings were held for both the Division and for Commissions 33 and 37.

The ultraviolet stellar wind lines of the photometrically periodic variable early B-type star σ Lupi were found to behave very similarly to what has been observed in known magnetic B stars, although no periodicity could be determined. AAT spectropolarimetric measurements with SEMPOL were obtained. We detected a longitudinal magnetic field with varying strength and amplitude of about 100 G with error bars of typically 20 G. This type of variability supports an oblique magnetic rotator model. We fold the equivalent width of the 4 usable UV spectra in phase with the well-known photometric period of 3.019 days, which we identify with the rotation period of the star. The magnetic field variations are consistent with this period. Additional observations with ESPaDOnS attached to the CFHT strongly confirmed this discovery, and allowed to determine a precise magnetic period. Like in the other magnetic B stars the wind emission likely originates in the magnetic equatorial plane, with maximum emission occurring when a magnetic pole points towards the Earth. The 3.0182 d magnetic rotation period is consistent with the photometric period, with maximum light corresponding to maximum magnetic field. No helium or other chemical peculiarity is known for this object.