Galactic and Extragalactic Star Formation

The conference will be held from Monday 8 to Friday 12 September 2014 in Marseille at the congress center “Palais du Pharo” located on the “Vieux Port”. It will focus on observational and computational star formation in the Milky Way and external galaxies, emphasizing the link between these fields. The first aim of this meeting is to bring together the Galactic and extragalactic communities to exchange new results and discuss the perspectives offered by rich existing and forthcoming facilities such as Herschel, Spitzer, Sofia, JWST, as well as radio-telescopes and interferometers such as ALMA, EVLA and the future NOEMA and SKA. The second aim of the conference is to confront the latest results regarding analytical models and simulations to detailed observations of clouds and star formation in the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Transformational Science in the ALMA Era: Multi-Wavelength Studies of Galaxy Evolution

During the Evolution 2014 Workshop four central themes in the field of galaxy evolution will be explored by bringing together current and future studies with ALMA and from across the electromagnetic spectrum from existing (e.g. VLA/GBT/IRAM/CARMA, HST, Spitzer/Herschel, Chandra/NuStar) as well as future facilities (e.g., JWST, MeerKAT/ASKAP/SKA, LSST, EUCLID, TMT/GMT/EELT, CCAT/LMT).

Synergistic Science with Euclid and the Square Kilometre Array

The next decade will see the beginning of operations of two of the largest survey telescopes that will revolutionize our understanding of the Universe. Euclid aims to map the Universe at optical and near-infrared wavelengths from space, and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) has similar scientific aims utilizing radio wavelength observations from two sites centred in South Africa and Australia. This meeting aims to explore the synergies between the Euclid satellite mission and the SKA. The meeting will cover possible scientific and technological synergies and is open to the worldwide astronomical community.

Topics will cover:

• Cosmology
• Galaxy Evolution
• Galaxy Clusters
• New Physics
• Links with other facilities

Locating Astrophysical Transients

New generation wide-field instruments, especially SKA pathfinders in the radio regime, will detect a huge number of transient sources that can be followed-up by very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) at the highest possible angular resolution. Finding and localization of these, as well as discussing the science case and realization of high resolution observations in multi-wavelength transient projects, is the main focus of the workshop. The science topics covered will be Galactic neutron stars (pulsars) and black holes, gamma-ray binaries, unidentified TeV sources, novae, supernovae, GRB, tidal disruption events and astrophysical sources of gravitational waves. The instruments and techniques to be introduced are the European VLBI Network (EVN), real-time e-VLBI, WSRT Apertif, SKA pathfinders (e-Merlin/LOFAR/ASKAP/MeerkAT/MWA/LWA) as well as transient facilities and programmes in the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Our main aims are to have both students and experienced researchers, from both the wide-field and the VLBI communities: 1) learn practical hands-on methods from each other’s fields in “school” fashion, 2) form the new collaborations needed to make this new connection of fields a success. Furthermore, by offering a scientific program of excellent confirmed speakers from across the electromagnetic and gravity-wave spectrum, we, introduce VLBI to a wider, non-radio astronomy transient community. We expect to strengthen the scientific case for a long-baseline configuration SKA as well.