Cosmic Horizons

It's been a tough week, especially battling the jet-lag (a few of my colleagues will have received email from me at 3am as my body refused to believe it was back in Australia!). This week, I'm please to post some science, with a new paper accepted for publication. As you will have seen over the years, we've had a number of discoveries from the  Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PAndAS) . This is an immense data-set, from which we've discovered many  dwarf galaxies  and  globular clusters . The most obvious of these, the largest and brightest, are easily spottable by eye (as proved by our globular cluster spotter-by-eye extraordinaire, Avon Huxor ). But with all this data, it's not only the obvious (or even slightly harder to detect) which we are after, we want to know what is also there, down at the very basic levels of the data. This is the focus of this paper by  Nicolas Martin . The paper is very technical, but the basic idea is straight-forward. We wan

Having just tumbled off a plane back from a most excellent conference (more on that later), a very quick post. Every year, the   Australian Museum  awards the  Eureka Prizes . These are a series of various prizes, for excellence in a range of disciplines, as well as rewarding early career and emerging leaders. This year, I'm pleased to say that newly-minted  Dr Anthony Conn  and I are finalists in the  University of New South Wales Eureka Prize for Scientific Research . This is for our work on the  rather mysterious plane of dwarf galaxies orbiting Andromeda . It's a tough field, and we find ourselves up against two very strong medical finalists. We find out on the 4th September who the winner is at the gala dinner. Anyway, you can read some more about it  here  and I'll let you know the results. Until then, here's one of our pictures for the entry.