Junge AG Summerschool, Garching, 2024
This year, the Summer School of the young German Astronomical Society (junge Astronomische Gesellschaft - jAG) took place in Garching, at the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), on 13th and 14th of July. As it has already become a custom, a joint dinner took place on Friday, before the start of the school, where the local organizers and some of the participants met and exchanged some summer school impressions from the past years.
On Saturday, Prof. Volker Springel opened the Summer School, with an introduction to the structure of the local institutes, the science they are doing, and their history. This was followed by a hands-on session - participants had the opportunity to get a taste of the local science - their task was to plot the large-scale distribution of galaxies in IllustrisTNG (read more about the Illustris project here: https://www.illustris-project.org/explorer/), and to draw conclusions about patial distribution of red and blue galaxies and the clustering pattern. Another task was related to the GADGET-4 cosmological N-body code (read more about GADGET-4 simulation code here: https://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/gadget4/).
After a fun hands-on workshop and the lunch break, Dr. Janine Fohlmeister gave a talk about science outreach, the do's and the don'ts, some common misconceptions and different ways of organizing science outreach activities, depending on the occasion and the type of the audience. After this, Prof. Michael Kramer gave an exciting talk about detecting gravitational waves via pulsar timing. Finally, Dr. Markus Hundertmark gave an overview of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory mission and science collaborations, about optimizing the cadence (in context of galactic gravitational microlensing), about public alerts, as well as about broker ecosystem/target and observations manager (read more about the Rubin Observatory: https://rubinobservatory.org/). Saturday ended with a pleasant atmosphere at the joint dinner at an indian restaurant Moti Mahal.
The second day of the summer school was designated for talks given by participants:
- Anna Maria-Weiss, Jugend forscht award talk: "The new exoplanet TOI1147b"
- Maël Gonin: "Primordial Black Holes : from universe 1st seconde to Dark Matter"
- Atul Kumar: "Dynamical Analysis of Galaxy Clusters , Redshift Determination & Radio X-ray Correlation in Galactic Black Hole Transients"
- Lukas Stock: "How to improve inexpensive echelle spectrographs"
- Wajdee Chayeb: "The Interplay between Gas Turbulence and Stellar Feedback in Giant Molecular Clouds"
- Menglei Zhou: “A concise overview of spectral-timing analysis on black hole binaries"
- Maryam Raouph: "Improving Photometric Calibration of Astronomical Plates using Gaia SED Fluxes"
- Yujia Du: “Spectral and Timing Analysis on X-ray Pulsars: A Brief Overview”.
After the talks, that have been followed by a dynamical exchange of scientific ideas, a visit to ESO Supernova took place, where participants and the local organizers enjoyed the exhibition, talked about ESO science, and those who had the opportunity to visit ESO's observatories talked about their experience - the path to the observatory, the flow of the observing nights, and the living conditions in the desert. The summer school was concluded by a joint lunch and a lively discussion about the past and the future of the jAG summer schools.
Our hopes are that each participant had a productive and pleasant summer school experience, taking home positive impressions.
Many thanks to the main organizer, Dr. Markus Hundertmark, for making the summer school possible. A big thank you to our host, Prof. Volker Springel and the MPA staff, to the invited speakers, and to our local organizing team (Sabina Bahic and Steven Haemmerich). And last, but most certainly not least, many thanks to all the participants for coming and providing a lively and inspired discussion.
See you next time!
Text: Sabina Bahić
Photo credit: Steven Hämmerich and Sabina Bahic
