[ASA] Second announcement: "Mock Perth: Challenges for Simulations in the Era of SKA and Large IFU Surveys"

[Claudia Lagos Urbina]

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the workshop "Mock Perth: Challenges for Simulations in the Era of SKA and Large IFU Surveys" to be held in Perth, Australia, from the 20th to the 22nd March 2017 (rationale below). Deadline for registration is 30th of January 2017. Please find the webpage here:

http://www.caastro.org/event/2017-mockperth

We will be receiving contributing talks, so please submit your title and abstract if you wish to give a talk. Please share this information with your colleagues.

Rationale:

We are entering an exciting era in the study of galaxy formation and evolution. Over the last decade or so, precision experiments have derived stringent limits on the key cosmological parameters, while large galaxy surveys (e.g. 2dF, SDSS, GAMA) have provided compelling insights into galaxy evolution in the nearby Universe using statistical samples of galaxies. Over the coming decade, next generation galaxy surveys (e.g. on ELTs, SKA, etc...) will probe in great detail the complex physical mechanisms that drive galaxy formation and evolution over a wide range of galaxy masses and over a much longer baseline in cosmic time, from the Epoch of Reionization to the present day.

In particular, our understanding of the low-mass regime will be transformed, as multi-object spectrographs and radio telescopes will survey galaxies with stellar masses below 100 million solar masses, and in some cases (e.g. 4MOST WAVES, ASKAP WALLABY/DINGO, SKA) will probe systems as low as a million solar masses. Modelling the properties of low-mass galaxies represents an exciting yet challenging opportunity for galaxy formation simulators. The success or failure of a model is judged typically against its ability to reproduce — broadly — the properties of populations of more massive galaxies. However, low-mass galaxies provide (arguably) the most stringent limits of the models, offering tests of the influence of formation time, gas accretion, feedback, environment, etc…

The aim of this workshop is to bring together world-leading simulators and observers in the field to identify and discuss how the models must be improved to provide robust predictions across the range of galaxy masses, from dwarf-scale upwards. We will focus on developments in modelling star formation, feedback and environmental processing, and what we have learned from small scale simulations and modelling that can be applied to cosmological simulations and semi-analytic models. We will also review the current observational status of dwarf galaxies and determine which observables are the key ones one would want to obtain if we are to apply our simulations to the next generation of surveys.

CONFIRMED INVITED SPEAKERS

    Luca Cortese - ICRAR
    Elisabete Da Cunha - ANU
    JJ Eldridge - Auckland
    Violeta Gonzalez-Perez - Portsmouth
    Brent Groves - ANU
    Alex Knebe - UMadrid
    Mark Krumholz - ANU
    Naomi McLure-Griffiths - ANU
    Simon Mutch - Melbourne University
    Nelson Padilla - Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
    Matthieu Schaller - Durham
    Jing Wang - CSIRO

Best regards,

Claudia Lagos on behalf of the SOC (Ivy Wong, Charlotte Welker, Chris Power)
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ARC Research Fellow                                                        Tel:(+61 8) 6488 3677
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research              web:www.clagos.com
University of Western Australia                                           7 Fairway, Crawley, Perth, Australia