Hunstead Workshop
2020 HUNSTEAD WORKSHOP: MAGPI Virtual Workshop
Virtual workshop, 14-17 April 2020.
MAGPI team members and representatives from relevant surveys and theoretical simulations also joined our productive 4–day meeting. Twenty–three people attended (virtually) fromAustralia and Europe to discuss the survey status, science updates and took part in strategic workshops, including various synergies with other groups.
Intensive 2–hour sessions were held each day. These were recorded and posted on the internal wiki for those who were unable to join live. Participants were encouraged to turn on their camera when they were speaking to allow for a more personal experience. As this was a “hands-on” workshop, participants came up with innovative ways to collaborate remotely. Tools like Slack, GitHub, Zoom, cloud storage and virtual desktops were amongst the tools that made the meeting a success. Feedback from all involved was overwhelmingly positive.
As the event was originally planned face-to-face, we would like to thank the Hunstead Gift for Astrophysics for their generous support, although we did not incur any costs.
2019 HUNSTEAD WORKSHOP: Dynamical Models of Observed Galaxies
The University of Sydney, 3-7 June 2019
Large new IFS Galaxy Surveys allow for a more detailed insight in the dynamical properties of galaxies than ever before. IFS instruments such as VLT-MUSE, AAT-SAMI, and MaNGA are now intensively used by the Australian community to understand how galaxies build up their mass and angular momentum over time. At the same time, there has been a revolution in surveying the Milky Way with ESA-Gaia, GALAH and APOGEE, resulting in an extraordinary number of recent publications on the dynamical properties of our own Galaxy.
Dynamical models of galaxies are crucial for interpreting all these stellar kinematic measurements, but fitting these models still requires a significant amount of effort and expertise. This workshop is aimed at making dynamical fitting and modelling more accessible to the Galactic and extragalactic community.
2018 HUNSTEAD WORKSHOP: Planets in Peculiar Places
The University of Sydney, 5-6 April 2018.
Exoplanetary science since 1995 has been dominated by a race to find the most Earth-like planets around the most Sun-like stars, but there are much stranger worlds in much more exotic systems than this. While we are beginning to have a clear picture of the formation and evolution of planetary systems around solar-like main-sequence stars, we are in the dark about planets around more massive stars in their lives and various afterlives. The Sydney Institute for Astronomy is hosting a Hunstead Workshop to bring together the vibrant and diverse community beginning to address these questions, interleaving talks by observers and theorists, focusing especially on the Australian contributions to asteroseismology and transit searches (Kepler, TESS), radial velocity (e.g. Veloce, RHEA, Minerva), pulsar timing, direct imaging, and large spectroscopic surveys, and how we can tie these efforts together to understand the strange physics of planets in these peculiar places.