Understanding Lyman-alpha emitters

6 - 10 October 2008

Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Heidelberg, Germany

Scientific Rationale

The method of finding young, starbursting, high redshift galaxies through their Lyman-alpha emission was proposed already forty years ago by Partridge and Peebles. It would take several decades before the discovery was first made. However, in the last fifteen years there has been great progress in the field of Lyman-alpha emitters. Despite the larger, ever-increasing samples of emitters between redshift z = 2 - 7, our understanding of this type of galaxy is still only beginning to accumulate, and the next couple of decades will probably see a great increase in this understanding. It is thus timely to hold a conference/workshop which will summarise our present knowledge about, and understanding of, these galaxies, and also to discuss how to reach further conclusions with our data in the future.

The conference/workshop will be divided into a three day conference (6-8/10) and a two day workshop (9-10/10) where the first three days will be 'results-oriented', with invited and contributed talks and shorter discussions, and the last two days will be 'method-oriented' with mostly discussion time. The overall idea of the meeting is to have ample discussion time so that new ideas can be born and old ideas rejected. Cross-topic discussions between theorists and observationalists, local universe and high redshift scientists are strongly encouraged. With the keywords 'Understanding Lyman-alpha emitters' in mind, the following topics are included in the scientific rationale of this meeting:

  • Results and methods of fitting the continuum of LAEs
  • Observations of Lyman-alpha in the local Universe
  • Lyman-alpha blobs
  • Luminosity functions and clustering results
  • Lyman-alpha as a star formation rate indicator
  • Radiative transfer modelling of Lyman-alpha
  • Galaxy evolution modelling of Lyman-alpha Emitters  

Confirmed invited speakers are: Johan Fynbo, Eric Gawiser, Matthew Hayes, Miguel Mas-Hesse, Esther Hu, Kentaro Nagamine, Masami Ouchi and Daniel Schaerer. Even though it is possible to attend only the conference part (Mon - Wed), we encourage all participants to take part in the full week program. As the number of seats in the MPIA Auditorium is limited, the SOC will reserve the possibility to select applicants, should the number of applicants exceed the number of seats.

There will be no proceedings of the usual kind from this conference, however we intend to print a conference summary in New Astronomy Reviews which will include summaries of all discussions held during the conference. Discussion chairs will be asked to summarise their sessions.

This conference is kindly sponsored by the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft / Sonderforschungsbereich.