SJAA Meeting – 2010.03.27

The SJAA General Meeting we held last Saturday evening was fantastic!<br />n<br />nConnie Rockosi, from UC Lick, talked about her work figuring out how galaxies form over (very long periods of) time. Some things that I found interesting and wrote down:<br />n- galaxies are not evenly distributed througout space<br />n- density perturbations -> gravity -> galaxies?<br />n- there is a spherical halo around our home galaxy, the Milky Way, made up of regular matter and… dark matter?<br />n- dwarf galaxies, such as the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, orbit the MW – are these the mass/density perturbations that are shown in the models?<br />n- we are/the sun is about 8 kilo parsecs from the center of the MW<br />n- tidal tails, as they are called, result from galaxies or star clusters coming close to other mass densities, such as other galaxies or clusters. Palomar 5 is a great example of an object with very well formed tidal tails.<br />n<a href=”http://www.seds.org/~spider/spider/MWGC/pal05.html” title=”palomar 5 cluster”>http://www.seds.org/~spider/spider/MWGC/pal05.html</a><br />n<br />nWe also heard from Cynthia Denny who talked about the Save Our State Parks initiative, which will create a trust fund for California State Parks.<br />n<a href=”http://www.savestateparks.org/” title=”save our state parks”>http://www.savestateparks.org/</a><br />n<br />nIt was an evening very well spent!