The statistical description of Giant Molecular Cloud (GMC) properties relies heavily on the performance of automatic identification algorithms, which are often seriously affected by the survey design. The algorithm we designed, SCIMES (Spectral Clustering for Molecular Emission Segmentation), is able to overcome some of these limitations by considering the cloud segmentation problem in the broad framework of the graph theory. The application of the code on the CO(3-2) High Resolution Survey (COHRS) data allowed for a robust decomposition of more than 12,000 objects in the Galactic Plane. Together with the wealth of Galactic Plane surveys of the recent years, this approach will help to open the door to a future, systematic cataloging of all discrete molecular features of our own Galaxy.

We propose a low-contrast pre-coronagraph that can provide additional dark-hole contrast to a main coronagraph.

I discuss stellar populations in galaxies at high redshift (z > 6), in particular the blue rest-frame UV colours which have been detected in recent years through near-IR imaging with HST. These spectral slopes of β < −2 are much more blue than star-forming galaxies at lower redshift, and may suggest less dust obscuration, lower metallicity or perhaps a different initial mass function. I describe current work on the luminosity function of high redshift star- forming galaxies, the evolution of the fraction of strong Lyman-α emitters in this population, and the contribution of the ionizing photon budget from such galaxies towards the reionization of the Universe. I also describe constraints placed by Spitzer/IRAC on stellar populations in galaxies within the first billion years, and look towards future developments in spectroscopy with Extremely Large Telescopes and the James Webb Space Telescope, including the JWST/NIRSpec GTO programme on galaxy evolution at high redshift.

Near-infrared observations reveal several infrared-excess sources near the Galactic Centre with emission lines present in their spectra. One of these objects, DSO/G2, which moves around the supermassive black hole (Sgr A*) on a highly eccentric orbit, passed the pericentre at approximately 160 AU in 2014. It remained compact, which implies that at least in this case it is a star embedded in a dusty envelope. The spectral energy distribution and the detection of polarized continuum emission indicate that it is probably a pre-main-sequence star surrounded by a dense envelope with bipolar cavities. In addition, the star associated with DSO/G2 plausibly develops a bow shock due to its supersonic motion. The model of the star surrounded by the non-spherical dusty envelope can reproduce the main characteristics of the DSO/G2 source: 1. spectral energy distribution in near-infrared bands; 2. linear polarization in Ks band; and 3. the overall compact behaviour.

The possibility that the Sun's radius is changing, even at a faint level, has been discussed over a long time. As the solar radius is certainly one of the most important basic pieces of astrophysical information, it is crucial to determine the physical mechanisms that may cause shrinking or expansion of the solar envelope. The wavelength dependence has been poorly inspected up to now. Here we examine recent solar radius determinations from space observations, mainly from Mercury and Venus transits, made by different teams in 2006, 2012 and 2014. Seemingly, the results are not consistent: authors interpreted the discrepancies because of the different methods of analysis used in their work. However, looking at the wavelength dependence, adding other available observations, from X-EUV up to radio, a typical relationship between the radius and the wavelength can be found, reflecting the different heights at which the lines are formed. Possible explanations are discussed. Such results can be interesting for studying solar-stellar connections.

While recent years have seen rapid growth in the number of galaxy peculiar velocity measurements, disagreements remain about the extent to which the peculiar velocity field - a tracer of the large-scale distribution of mass - agrees with both ΛCDM expectations and with velocity field models derived from redshift surveys. The 6dF Galaxy Survey includes peculiar velocities for nearly 9 000 early-type galaxies (6dFGSv), making it the largest and most homogeneous galaxy peculiar velocity sample to date. We have used the 6dFGS velocity field to determine the amplitude and scale of large-scale cosmic flows in the local universe and test standard cosmological models. We also compare the galaxy density and peculiar velocity fields to establish the distribution of dark and luminous matter and better constrain key cosmological parameters such as the redshift-space distortion parameter.

We describe the challenges inherent to low surface brightness imaging and present some early results from the Dragonfly Nearby Galaxies survey. Wide field, ultra-low surface brightness imaging (μg > 31 mag arcsec−2) of the first eight galaxies in the survey reveals a rich variety in the distribution of stars in the outskirts of luminous nearby galaxies. The mean stellar halo mass fraction is 0.009 ± 0.005 with a peak-to-peak scatter of a factor of > 100. Some galaxies in the sample feature strongly structured halos resembling that of M31, but three of the eight galaxies have halos that are completely undetected in our data. We conclude that spiral galaxies as a class exhibit a rich variety in stellar halo properties, implying that their assembly histories have been highly non-uniform. While the outskirts of some galaxies are dominated by halos with the rich substructures predicted by numerical simulations, in other cases the outermost parts of galaxies are simply the extrapolated smooth starlight from enormous stellar disks that closely trace neutral gas morphology out to around 20 scale lengths.

While in external or high-redshift galaxies we can only measure integrated stellar properties at best, the Milky Way offers us the unique opportunity to study its individual baryonic components, including stars. We use oscillations measured in red giant stars by the Kepler satellite to derive stellar ages and explore the vertical age structure across few kpc of the Milky Way disc. We find that old stars dominate at increasing Galactic heights, whereas closer to the plane a rich zoology of ages exists. The age distribution of stars shows a smooth distribution over the last 10 Gyr, which together with a flat age-metallicity relation is consistent with a quiescent evolution for the Milky Way disc since a redshift of about two.

The mass and cumulative mass profile of the Galaxy are its most fundamental properties. Estimating these properties, however, is not a trivial problem. We rely on the kinematic information from Galactic satellites such as globular clusters and dwarf galaxies, and this data is incomplete and subject to measurement uncertainty. In particular, the complete 3D velocity vectors of objects are sometimes unavailable, and there may be selection biases due to both the distribution of objects around the Galaxy and our measurement position. On the other hand, the uncertainties of these data are fairly well understood. Thus, we would like to incorporate these uncertainties and the incomplete data into our estimate of the Milky Way's mass. The Bayesian paradigm offers a way to deal with both the missing kinematic data and measurement errors using a hierarchical model. An application of this method to the Milky Way halo mass profile, using the kinematic data for globular clusters and dwarf satellites, is shown.

Understanding the production of ionising photons in galaxies, how these photons propagate, ionise and heat the interstellar medium and possibly leak out of their host galaxies is key to understand many aspects of galaxy evolution and their contribution to reionisation. I will outline some projects currently undertaken to investigate the ionising photon budget.

I present an overview of the recent star formation activity in the outer disks of spiral galaxies, from the observational standpoint, with emphasis on the gas content, the star formation law, the metallicity and the stellar populations.

As a step towards a more accurate modelling of redshift-space distortions (RSD) in galaxy surveys, we develop a general description of the probability distribution function of galaxy pairwise velocities within the framework of the so-called streaming model. For a given galaxy separation , such function can be described as a superposition of virtually infinite local distributions. We characterize these in terms of their moments and then consider the specific case in which they are Gaussian functions, each with its own mean μ and variance σ2. Based on physical considerations, we make the further crucial assumption that these two parameters are in turn distributed according to a bivariate Gaussian, with its own mean and covariance matrix. Tests using numerical simulations explicitly show that with this compact description one can correctly model redshift-space distorsions on all scales, fully capturing the overall linear and nonlinear dynamics of the galaxy flow at different separations. In particular, we naturally obtain Gaussian/exponential, skewed/unskewed distribution functions, depending on separation as observed in simulations and data. Also, the recently proposed single-Gaussian description of redshift-space distortions is included in this model as a limiting case, when the bivariate Gaussian is collapsed to a two-dimensional Dirac delta function. More work is needed, but these results indicate a very promising path to make definitive progress in our program to improve RSD estimators.

A peculiar source in the Galactic center known as the Dusty S-cluster Object (DSO/G2) moves on a highly eccentric orbit around the supermassive black hole with the pericenter passage in the spring of 2014. Its nature has been uncertain mainly because of the lack of any information about its intrinsic geometry. For the first time, we use near-infrared polarimetric imaging data to obtain constraints about the geometrical properties of the DSO. We find out that DSO is an intrinsically polarized source, based on the significance analysis of polarization parameters, with the degree of the polarization of ~30% and an alternating polarization angle as it approaches the position of Sgr A*. Since the DSO exhibits a near-infrared excess of Ks-L′ > 3 and remains rather compact in emission-line maps, its main characteristics may be explained with the model of a pre-main-sequence star embedded in a non-spherical dusty envelope.

The assembly of matter in the universe proliferates a wide variety of halo structures, often with enigmatic consequences. Giant spiral galaxies, for example, contain both dark matter and hot gas, while dwarf spheroidal galaxies, with weaker gravity, contain much larger fractions of dark matter, but little gas. Globular clusters, superficially resembling these dwarf spheroidals, have little or no dark matter. Halo temperatures are also puzzling: hot cluster halos contain cooler galaxy halos; dwarf galaxies have no hot gas at all despite their similar internal processes. Another mystery is the origin of the gas that galaxies require to maintain their measured star formation rates (SFRs). We outline how gravitational quantum theory solves these problems, and enables baryons to function as weakly-interacting-massive-particles (WIMPs) in Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) theory. Significantly, these dark-baryon ensembles may also be consistent with primordial nucleosynthesis (BBN) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies.

The widths of total solar eclipse paths depends on the diameter of the Sun, so if observations are obtained near both the northern and southern limits of the eclipse path, in principle, the angular diameter of the Sun can be measured. Concerted efforts have been made to obtain contact timings from locations near total solar eclipse path edges since the mid 19th century, and Edmund Halley organized a rather successful first effort in 1715. Members of IOTA have been making increasingly sophisticated observations of the Baily's bead phenomena near central solar eclipse path edges since 1970.

Massive early-type galaxies undergo a significant process of evolution with redshift on the stellar mass vs size plane. Furthermore, this trend does not depend on the age of their stellar populations. Therefore, such an evolution should involve processes that do not include a significant amount of star formation, leaving (mostly) dry mergers as the main growth channel. By studying close pairs involving a massive galaxy, one can quantify the role of mergers on the growth of massive galaxies. A recent study based on the SHARDS dataset reveals that minor mergers cannot be the dominant mechanism to explain the bulk of size growth in these systems. Merging is found to provide a constant fractional growth rate of ~10% per Gyr from redshift z=1, corresponding to an overall stellar mass increase of 2× between z=1 and z=0.

The Kepler Mission, combined with ground based radial velocity (RV) follow-up, has revolutionized the observational constraints on sub-Neptune-size planet compositions. Kepler's unprecedentedly large and homogeneous samples of planets with both mass and radius constraints open the possibility of statistical studies of the underlying planet composition distribution. This presentation describes the application of hierarchical Bayesian models to constrain the underlying planet composition distribution from a sample of noisy mass-radius measurements. This approach represents a promising avenue toward a quantitative measurement of the amount of physical scatter in small planet compositions, the identification of planet sub-populations that may be tied to distinct formation pathways, and empirical constraints on the dominant compositional trends in the planet sample. Both the transit and radial velocity techniques are subject to selection effects, and approaches to mitigate the resulting biases will be addressed. In addition to distilling composition-distribution insights from the current sample of Kepler planets with RV masses, this framework may be used to optimize the target selection for future transiting planet RV follow-up surveys.

The relationship between active galactic nuclei (AGN) and starburst galaxies is poorly understood, partially due to galaxies exhibiting both AGN and starburst activity. To better understand the connection, we analyze a sample of “pure” AGN or starburst at redshift z = 0.1 selected using mean field independent component analysis (MFICA). Simulations of starburst galaxy emission suggests that the locally optimally-emitting cloud (LOC) model can fit observations and improve our ability to distinguish the impact of differences in metallicity, ionization parameter, and ionizing flux. To test for the existence of such clouds in our galaxy sample, we examine the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) images of our pure galaxies. At this distance, even large star-forming H II regions (e.g. 30 Doradus) only fill part of an SDSS pixel. However, we compare the morphology of the distant galaxies to more nearby ones (i.e. NGC 4713, NGC 4038/4039) to estimate the number of larger H II regions. While the clumpiness parameter of a galaxy in theory might indicate the existence of these regions, a straightforward calculation of the clumpiness parameter is ineffective for galaxies at z = 0.1. Typically, one subtracts a smoothed version of a galaxy image from the same image. We instead test a different approach to establish a smooth image and thus better identify the clumps. We subtract the smoother infrared z-band from the sharper ultraviolet u-band. We test this procedure using NGC 4713, a nearby starburst galaxy, artificially degraded to match images of our “pure” starburst galaxies.

Galaxy morphology is a first-order descriptor of a galaxy and a useful proxy to identify physical processes. The 100 years old Hubble fork describes the structural diversity of galaxies in the local universe. Unveiling the origins of this galaxy zoology is a key challenge in galaxy evolution. In this review talk, I first summarized some key advances in our understanding of the morphological evolution of galaxies from z ~ 0 to z ~ 3, thank you in particular to the SDSS and HST legacies. In the second part, I focused on the classification techniques. With the emergence in the last years of large surveys the samples of study have increased by several orders of magnitude going from a few tens to several millions of objects. This trend will clearly continue in the next decade with coming surveys/missions such as EUCLID and WFIRST. While galaxy classification is still a required step in any survey, visual inspection of galaxies is becoming prohibitively time-consuming. Under these circumstances, the techniques used to estimate galaxy morphologies need to be updated.

We show how present-day 10 meter class telescopes can provide broadband imaging 1.5-2 mag deeper than most previous results within a reasonable amount of time ( ~ 8h on source integration). We illustrate the ability of the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GTC) telescope to produce imaging with a limiting surface brightness of 31.5 mag/arcsec2 (3σ in 10 × 10 arcsec boxes). We explore the stellar halos of nearby galaxies obtaining surface brightness radial profiles down to μr ~ 33 mag/arcsec2. This depth is similar to that obtained using star counts techniques of Local Group galaxies, but is achieved at a distance where this technique is unfeasible.