Oxford astro-ph Coffee

Hezaveh et al simulate ALMA cycle 1 (ie 0.16" resolution) observations of Herschel/SPT sub mm lensed galaxies, and claim that the magnification is high enough, and the sources likely to be complex enough, to enable the detection of at least one DM subhalo of mass 10^8 or greater *in every system*

"Observations of lensing of the 21-cm background from the dark ages will be capable of detecting M>~10^12 Msun/h mass halos, but will require futuristic experiments to overcome the contaminating sources."

Purcell and Zentner on why the "Too Big To Fail" problem might be a storm in a teacup: "We propose that the large variation in subhalo populations among different host halos can explain the dearth of large, dense subhalos orbiting the Milky Way without any making any adjustments to the host halo mass or accounting for baryonic feedback processes."

They show that the mean redshift-magnitude relation from a spectroscopic survey can be used to infer peculiar velocities.

Hints of something interesting or data artefact? Also: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.4781v1.pdf

Maybe an ACT insider could tell us more...

K.A. Meissner, P. Nurowski, B. Ruszczycki

A star with a mid-IR excess (circumstellar disk?) that vanishes in a 2-year interval.

Astrophysics > Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics Title: First measurement of the bulk flow of nearby galaxies using the cosmic microwave background (Submitted on 6 Jul 2012) Abstract: Peculiar velocities in the nearby Universe can be measured via the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect.

The first detection of a filament.

Very nice. I'm a little surprised that it's the first detection - I swear some people working on this a few years ago. But maybe their detection wasn't significant enough. At least, they didn't get a Nature paper out of it!