Ten years ago our team completed the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the extragalactic distance scale. Cepheids were detected in some 25 galaxies and used to calibrate four secondary distance indicators that reach out into the expansion field beyond the noise of galaxy peculiar velocities. The result was H0 = 72 ± 8 km s−1 Mpc−1 and put an end to galaxy distances uncertain by a factor of two. This work has been awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology for 2009.

The scientific community is celebrating in 2009 the International Year of Astronomy. The timing coincides with the 400th anniversary of the first astronomical use of a telescope, when Galileo's observations demonstrated that the Earth is not alone in the Universe. One can hardly think of a more important event in the history of mankind.

Water is an abundant molecule in the Cosmos. It has exploitable and unique spectroscopic and physical properties and has been found to be ubiquitous in places that we would expect in the standard model of solar system formation and nebular condensation: beyond the snow line in outer solar system planets, moons, asteroids, and comets. However, water is also an important constituent of planetary bodies (dominating at least one of their surfaces) in the inner solar system, likely indicating significant mixing between inner and outer solar system reservoirs of water during planetary accretion and the early history of the solar system. Water has played a critical role in the differential evolution of the terrestrial planets Venus, Earth, and Mars, and the concept of the “habitable zone” where liquid water could be stable on an Earth-like planet provides a starting point for assessing the habitability of worlds in our solar system and beyond. Examples of potentially habitable environments outside this zone in our own solar system warn us that this concept should only be a guide, however-important exceptions will no doubt occur. Recent discoveries of past liquid water and abundant present subsurface ice on Mars, of water reservoirs in unexpected places like the poles of Mercury and the Moon and the subsurface of Enceladus, of water in circumstellar disks and in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, and the expectation of the discovery of water on Earth-like worlds in the habitable zones around other stars make this an exciting time in the study of water on planets both in our own solar system, and beyond.

Recent studies of the Cosmic Microwave Background have provided us with a high quality image of the Universe when it was only 380,000 years old. At that time it was a near-uniform mixture of hydrogen, helium, dark matter and radiation, with no galaxies, no stars, no planets and no people, indeed no atomic nuclei heavier than Lithium. Under the action of gravity, the weak fluctuations observed in the microwave sky evolved into the extraordinarliy complex structure of our present Universe. I will show how supercomputer simulations can be used to demonstrate that such evolution does indeed reproduce the observed properties of today's galaxies and large-scale structures, thus confirming the extraordinary assumptions of the current structure formation paradigm. Only a quarter of the energy density of the present Universe is in gravitating matter; only a sixth of this matter is made of atoms or other known particles; only 5 percent of this baryonic material is currently inside galaxies. Most of today's Universe is in the form of Dark Energy; most of the gravitating matter is Dark Matter; and most of the baryons remain unseen in intergalactic space. The properties of the fluctuations measured in the microwave sky suggest that they originated very close to the Big Bang as quantum fluctuations of the vacuum itself. Everything has formed from nothing.

Historically, low luminosity stars have attracted very little attention, in part because they are difficult to see except with large telescopes, however, by neglecting to study them we are leaving out the vast majority of stars in the Universe. Low mass stars evolve very slowly, it takes them trillions of years to burn their hydrogen, after which, they just turn into a He white dwarf, without ever going through the red giant phase. This lack of observable evolution partly explains the lack of interest in them. The search for the “missing mass” in the galactic plane turned things around and during the 60s and 70s the search for large M/L objects placed M-dwarfs and cool WDs among objects of astrophysical interest. New fields of astronomical research, like BDs and exoplanets appeared as spin-offs from efforts to find the “missing mass”. The search for halo white dwarfs, believed to be responsible for the observed microlensing events, is pursued by several groups. The progress in these last few years has been tremendous, here I present highlights some of the great successes in the field and point to some of the still unsolved issues.

We summarize the motivations and main conclusions of the joint discussion “Dark Matter in Early-type Galaxies”.

The halos of elliptical galaxies, through their orbit and angular momentum distribution, contain important information about the formation and evolution of these systems.

Dynamical models of galaxies are limited by the paucity of kinematic data at large radii. Beyond the feasible limit of integrated-light spectroscopy, we rely on discrete tracers such as planetary nebulae and globular clusters. We describe a large (~200) sample of planetary nebula (PN) velocities in the outer regions of the cD elliptical NGC 1399. These data were obtained with a counter-dispersed slitless-spectroscopy technique which traces the kinematics to about 60 kpc (McNeil et al., 2009).

We detail an innovative new technique for measuring the 2-D velocity moments (rotation velocity, velocity dispersion and Gauss-Hermite coefficients h3 and h4) using spectra from Keck DEIMOS multi-object spectroscopic observations. The data are used to reconstruct 2-D rotation velocity maps.

We studied the kinematics of the halo of a sample of 16 early type galaxies out to 5-10 effective radii using Planetary Nebulae (PNe) as kinematic tracers (Coccato et al. 2009).

We developed a new method to obtain absorption line spectra of early-type galaxies at large radii, using integral-field spectrography (IFS). By using the spectrograph as a 'photon-collector' and adding the signal of many individual spaxels together in one spectrum, we obtain sufficient signal-to-noise to measure both stellar kinematics and line strengths at large radii. These can be used to determine the properties of the dark matter halo, as well as the stellar halo population.

In the past few years gravitational lensing has allowed astrophysicists to make great progress in the understanding of the internal structure of early-type galaxies. By taking advantage of accurate photometric and spectroscopic measurements, the luminous and dark matter content of lens galaxies can in principle be disentangled (e.g., Grillo et al. 2008, 2009). SDSS J1538+5817 is an extraordinary strong lensing system composed of an elliptical galaxy and two equally-distant sources located, respectively, at redshifts 0.143 and 0.531 (Grillo et al., submitted to ApJ). The sources are lensed into two and four images with an almost complete Einstein ring, covering a rather large region on the lens plane. By using HST/ACS and WFPC2 imaging and NOT/ALFOSC spectroscopy, we have investigated the lens total mass distribution within one effective radius. Then, we have fitted the SDSS multicolor photometry of the galaxy with composite stellar population models to obtain its luminous mass. By combining lensing and photometric measurements, we have estimated the lens mass in terms of luminous and dark matter components and studied the global properties of the dark matter halo. The exceptional lensing configuration of this system has allowed us to conclude that the galaxy dark matter density distribution is shallower and more diffused than the luminous one and the former starts exceeding the latter at a distance of approximately 1.5 times the effective radius. Extending these results to a larger number of lenses would help us to decipher the processes that rule galaxy formation and evolution in the LCDM scenario.

Constraints on the masses of dark matter haloes associated with galaxies in the field and in clusters have been successfully obtained used galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques. Weak lensing thus provides important information on the mass distribution in galaxies at large radii in a statistical fashion. Current work suggests that all galaxies possess extended dark matter haloes, however those that host galaxies in clusters are less extended and less massive.

Strong gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics provide two complementary methods in the study of the mass distribution of dark matter in galaxies out to redshift of unity. They are particularly powerful in the determination of the total mass and the density profile of mass early-type galaxies on kpc to tens of kpc scales, and also reveal the presence of mass-substructure on sub-kpc scale. I will shortly discuss these topics in this review.

We use data from 58 strong lensing events surveyed by the Sloan Lens ACS Survey to estimate the projected galaxy mass inside their Einstein radii by two independent methods: stellar dynamics and strong gravitational lensing. We perform a joint analysis of both estimates examining the galaxy-lens density profile (that we approximate by a power law), the anisotropy of the velocity distribution (represented by an effective constant parameter), and a possible line-of-sigh (l.o.s.) mass contamination (which is suggested by various independent works in the literature). For each model, a likelihood analysis is performed to find the parameters that produce the best agreement between the dynamical and lensing masses, and the parameter confidence levels. The Bayesian evidence is calculated to allow a comparison among the models. We find a degeneracy among the slope of the density profile, the anisotropy parameter and the l.o.s. mass contamination. For a density profile close to isothermal, a l.o.s. mass contamination of the order of a few percent is possible, being less probable with larger anisotropy.

We present Chandra X-ray observations of 14 quadruply lensed quasars. The X-ray data reveal flux ratio anomalies which are more extreme than those seen at optical wavelengths, confirming the microlensing origin of the anomalies originally seen in the optical data. The reduction of the anomalies in the optical, as compared to X-ray, indicates that the sizes of the optical emitting regions of the quasars must be about 1/3 the size of the projected Einstein radii of the microlensing stars. The X-ray emitting regions are essentially point sources and therefore give a microlensing signal unencumbered by source size considerations. For each lensing galaxy, we determine the most likely ratio of smooth material (dark matter) to clumpy material (stars) to explain the X-ray flux ratios. The ensemble of Chandra-observed quads indicates that the amount of matter projected along the lines of sight to the images (at radial distances of several kpc from the centers of the lensing galaxies) is ~90% smooth dark matter and ~10% stars.

Simple gravitational lens models usually suffice to reproduce the positions of lensed quasar images, but they have problems to reproduce their optical flux ratios. The so-called flux ratio anomalies are thought to be produced by small-scale structure in the lens galaxies (microlensing).

A model of an isolated dwarf spherical galaxy (dSph) is considered in its chemo-dynamical evolution with time. The system is composed by 3 γ-model density profiles: gas, stellar and dark matter, and it is realized in a spherical symmetric equilibrium configuration. The total masses used in our simulations are covering the dwarf galaxies mass range. The stability of this configuration is first tested for the system evolving under the gravity effect alone and then evolved taking into account for the most relevant stellar astrophysical processes implemented with a Smooth Particle Hydrodynamic approach. The two different kinds of evolution are compared. The dark matter evolves naturally from a centrally cuspy density profile into a flatter one within a timescale of several Gyr. The effect manifests itself naturally, without any tuned initial conditions, as soon as few standard criteria on star formation are assumedand the SN feedback on the ISM has been adopted the prescription in (Cioffi & Shull 1991) and (Bradamante et al. 1998). This result is expected to be a possible natural explanation for the discrepancy between observations that want flatter dark matter profiles (e.g. de Block 2005), and N-body simulations that predict cuspy dark matter profiles (Navarro et al. 1997). Chemical considerations are presented as a tool to follow with observational parameters the theory predictions.

Mass profile determinations for dispersion supported galaxies from line-of-sight velocities are subject to large uncertainties associated with the unknown stellar velocity anisotropy. We demonstrate both analytically and with available kinematic data (for systems spanning eight decades in luminosity) that the mass-anisotropy degeneracy is effectively eliminated at a characteristic radius that is close to the 3D deprojected half-light radius of the stars. This allows a simple, yet accurate formula to describe the half-light dark matter masses of all hot systems, including dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs), based on directly observable parameters: M1/2 = 4σ2LOSRhalf/G, where Rhalf is the 2D projected half-light radius and σLOS is the luminosity-weighted square of the line-of-sight velocity dispersion. The fact that masses are well-constrained within a characteristic stellar radius has allowed our group to perform systematic, accurate mass determinations for Milky Way dSphs and to conclude that they all have a common mass scale of approximately 107 M⊙ within 300 pc of their centers. We extend this work to the satellite population of Andromeda using Keck/DEIMOS spectroscopy of individual stars. We find that the Andromeda dSphs are also consistent with sharing a common mass, but that it is offset from the scale of the Milky Way dSphs by a factor of ~2.

Early-type galaxies do not come in any shape, form, and color. Many of their observable properties obey tight correlations, also known as empirical scaling relations. The correlations are non-trivial, in the sense that they cannot be explained by simple physical or dimensional arguments. A subset of the empirical scaling relations connects baryonic observables with quantities that depend on the total gravitational potential of the galaxies, and thus on their dark matter content. These correlations are a fundamental testbed for our understanding of the formation and evolution of early-type galaxies, and, more in general, of the physical processes that determine the interplay between baryons and dark matter at galactic scales.