Planck is a cosmology experiment, but significant interstellar dust and gas emission exists in the band where the CMB peaks. Therefore, Planck's all-sky surveys provide new views of the ISM and magnetic fields in the Galaxy, as well as the dust and gas in galaxies.

Observation of pulsar glitches remains a powerful tool for studying the interior of neutron stars. Many of the observed glitch properties are shown to result from the evolution of glitches in the different manifestations of neutron stars. Specifically, the type of glitches associated with the Crab and Vela pulsars are explained by this model. We are, also, able to adequately account for the absence, or very low rate, of glitches among the youngest and the very old pulsars.

The unique atmospheric conditions which pertain in the high Antarctic plateau offer dramatic gains for many areas of Astrophysics. Optical Interferometry is among the most technologically demanding branches of modern instrumentation, and furthermore, is one which is most strongly limited by the stability of the atmosphere at the observatory site. The long-term potential for spectacular gains by implementing an interferometer on the high Antarctic plateau are presented.

High spatial-resolution measurements of surface brightness fluctuations (SBFs) with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) provide the most precise distances available to early-type galaxies beyond the Local Group. The observable SBF magnitude in a given bandpass is a basic property of any stellar system, corresponding to a ratio of the first and second moments of the stellar luminosity function. Calibration of the method has presented challenges, but we now have an excellent empirical determination of how the SBF observable varies with galaxy color in broad bandpasses at the red end of the optical spectrum, and we are working towards a similar calibration for HST's Wide-Field Camera 3 in the near-infrared wavelength range, where the SBF magnitudes are considerably brighter. From HST Advanced Camera for Surveys data, we have determined the relative distances of the Virgo and Fornax clusters to within a precision of 2%, and resolved their internal structures. More recent measurements allow us to tie the Coma cluster, the standard of comparison for distant cluster studies, to the same precise distance scale. The SBF method can be calibrated in an absolute sense either empirically using Cepheids or theoretically based on stellar population models. The agreement between model and empirical zero points provides an independent confirmation of the Cepheid distance scale.

The spectroscopic study of blue supergiants in nearby galaxies can yield crucial information about the spatial distribution of extinction by dust, and can be successfully used to measure the metal content, abundance patterns, and distances of galaxies out to ~8 Mpc with current telescopes and instrumentation. We briefly review the results of an ongoing project in which the quantitative analysis of B- and A-type supergiants is used to independently test widely used metallicity diagnostics for star-forming galaxies and derive reddening-free extragalactic distances.

We present an overview of the present observational status of unexplained spectral phenomena in the ISM. The possibility of organic molecules and solids as the carrier of the DIB, 217 nm feature, ERE, UIR, and the 21 and 30 μm features is discussed.

Type Ia supernovae remain one of Astronomy's most precise tools for measuring distances in the Universe. I describe the cosmological application of these stellar explosions, and chronicle how they were used to discover an accelerating Universe in 1998 - an observation which is most simply explained if more than 70% of the Universe is made up of some previously undetected form of ‘Dark Energy’. Over the intervening 13 years, a variety of experiments have been completed, and even more proposed to better constrain the source of the acceleration. I review the range of experiments, describing the current state of our understanding of the observed acceleration, and speculate about future progress in understanding Dark Energy.

Late-type stars exhibit cool regions on their surface, the stellar equivalent of sunspots. These dark starspots can also mimic the radial velocity variations caused by orbiting planets, making it at times difficult to distinguish between planets and activity signatures. The amount of spots on the Sun and other cool stars changes cyclically during an activity cycle, which has length varying from about a year to longer than the solar 11 years. In this work we investigate the influence of varying amount of starspots on the sparsely sampled radial velocity observations - which are the norm in the radial velocity studies searching for exoplanets on wide orbits. We study two simulated cases: one with a random spot configuration, and one where the spot occurrence is concentrated. In addition we use Doppler images of young solar analogue V889 Her as a high activity case.

Recent discovery of extrasolar planets indicates that some of them have much higher eccentricity than the planets in the solar system. Here, we investigate the climate of such eccentric terrestrial planets with oceans and carbonate-silicate geochemical cycles. We find that the climate of the planets are dependent on the annual mean insolation as shown in previous works. We also find that the planets orbiting slightly further from our Sun than the Earth are globally ice-covered even if the carbonate-silicate geochemical cycle works under the same CO2 degassing rate as on the present Earth. However, when the CO2 degassing rate is higher, the planets avoid being globally ice-covered owing to the high level.

In this invited talk, I first discuss the advantages and disadvantages of many probes for the magnetic fields of the Milky Way. I conclude that pulsars are the best probes for the magnetic structure in our Galaxy, because magnetic field strength and directions can be derived from their dispersion measures (DMs) and rotation measures (RMs). Using the pulsars as probes, magnetic field structures in the Galactic disk, especially the field reversals between the arms and interarm regions, can be well revealed from the distribution of RM data. The field strengths on large scales and small scales can be derived from RM and DM data. RMs of extragalactic radio sources can be used as the indication of magnetic field directions in the spiral tangential regions, and can be used as probes for the magnetic fields in the regions farther away than pulsars when their median RMs are compared with pulsar RMs.

We present recent activities delivering astronomy to the public by the Tenpla project in Japan. One is voluntary activities in the disaster area of the Great East Japan Earthquake. The other is holding tens of star parties and public lectures in the central area of Tokyo.

The [N ii] line is a major coolant in ionized interstellar medium, and is expected to be a good star formation rate indicator. Here we present a statistical study of [N ii] line emission for a large sample of local luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs) using Herschel SPIRE FTS data (Lu et al. 2012; Zhao et al. 2012, in preparation). For our sample of galaxies, the [N ii] to the total infrared luminosity ratio (L[Nii]/LIR) varies from ∼ 10−5 to ∼ 10−4. We investigate the correlation between L[Nii] and LIR, as well as the dependence of L[Nii]/LIR on LIR, infrared colors (f60/f100) and the OIII 88 μm to [N ii] luminosity ratio. We find that L[Nii] strongly, and almost linearly correlates with LIR for star-forming galaxies, namely log LIR = (4.23 ± 0.33) + (0.99 ± 0.05) log L[NII] (see Fig. 1). The scatter in this relation is mainly due to the variation of hardness, and/or high ionization parameter, of the background UV field.

The Fermi-LAT source 2FGL J2339.6-0532 is likely to host a millisecond pulsar in a ‘black-widow’ system. Strong indications of its nature come from gamma rays and particularly from optical and X-ray observations. However, no pulsations have been found so far neither in radio nor in gamma rays, despite deep searches. I will present here our efforts to find pulsations in Fermi-LAT data. I will describe the uncertainties in the orbital and spin parameters of the source, broadly covered in our search. I will prove the robustness of our technique on other similar systems, and through simulations. I will present the results of our search: the most likely candidates and the further constraints on the parameters of the putative pulsar. Finally, I will discuss the implications of our results and the prospects to find pulsations in this and other similar systems in the future.

In this contribution we present the results of an Eulerian adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) hydrodynamical and N-body simulation in a ΛCDM cosmology. The simulation used was performed with the cosmological code MASCLET (Quilis et al. 2004). Galaxies have been identified in the simulation outputs by means of an adaptive friends of friends algorithm applied to the star particles. To give light to our virtual galaxies we have assigned a spectrum to each stellar particle using the MIUSCAT stellar population models (Vazdekis et al. 2012; Ricciardelli et al. 2012).

The Kepler Mission was designed to measure the frequency of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. A requirement for determining the underlying planet population from a sample of detected planets is understanding the completeness of that sample—what fraction of the planets that could have been discovered in a given data set were actually detected. Here we describe an experiment designed to address a specific aspect of that question, which is the issue of signal throughput efficiency. We investigate the extent to which the Kepler pipeline preserves transit signals by injecting simulated transit signals into the pixel-level data, processing the modified pixels through the pipeline, and measuring their detection statistics. For the single channel that we examine initially, we inject simulated transit signal trains into the pixel time series of each of the 1801 targets for the 89 days that constitute Quarter 3. For the 1680 that behave as expected in the pipeline, on average we find the strength of the injected signal is recovered at 99.6% of the strength of the original signal. Finally we outline the further work required to characterise the completeness of the Kepler pipeline.

The evolution of masses and sizes of passive (early-type) galaxies with redshift provides ideal constraints to galaxy formation models. These parameters can in principle be obtained for large galaxy samples from multi-band photometry alone. However the accuracy of photometric masses is limited by the non-universality of the IMF. Galaxy sizes can be biased at high redshift due to the inferior quality of the imaging data. Both problems can be avoided using galaxy dynamics, and in particular by measuring the galaxies stellar velocity dispersion. Here we provide an overview of the efforts in this direction.

Six years ago, the discovery of Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs) marked what appeared to be a new type of sparsely-emitting pulsar. Since 2006, more than 70 of these objects have been discovered in single-pulse searches of archival and new surveys. With a continual inflow of new information about the RRAT population in the form of new discoveries, multi-frequency follow ups, coherent timing solutions, and pulse rate statistics, a view is beginning to form of the place in the pulsar population RRATs hold. Here we review the properties of neutron stars discovered through single pulse searches. We first seek to clarify the definition of the term RRAT, emphasising that “the RRAT population” encompasses several phenomenologies. A large subset of RRATs appears to represent the tail of an extended distribution of pulsar nulling fractions and activity cycles; these objects present several key open questions remaining in this field.

We present our preliminary results on the application of dendrogram statistics to the carbon monoxide PPV map of the giant molecular cloud G333. We obtain the dendrograms at various merging levels and found the clustering of branches is independent from the merging levels. The statistics of intensity distributions show gravity is possibly significant in this cloud and the gas may be sonic. Application of this method to other molecular lines data are required for further analysis of the cloud properties.

Attempting to distangle density and kinetic temperature of the star forming molecular gas in the central regions of galaxies, we have embarked on a project involving sensitive measurements of a variety of formaldehyde (H2CO) and ammonia (NH3) transitions. Preliminary results, based on observations from the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and the Very Large Array (VLA) are summarized and an outline for the entire project is given.

Observing high-energy gamma-rays from Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) offers a unique potential to probe extremely tiny values of the intergalactic magnetic field (IGMF), a long standing question of astrophysics, astroparticle physics and cosmology. Very high energy (VHE) photons from blazars propagating along the line of sight interact with the extragalactic background light (EBL) and produce e + e − pairs. Through inverse-Compton interaction, mainly on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), these pairs generate secondary GeV-TeV components accompanying the primary VHE signal. Such secondary components would be detected in the gamma-ray range as delayed “pair echos” for very weak IGMF (B < 10−16G), while they should result in a spatially extended gamma-ray emission around the source for higher IGMF values (B > 10−16G). Coordinated observations with space (i.e. Fermi) and ground-based gamma-ray instruments, such as the present Cherenkov experiments H.E.S.S., MAGIC and VERITAS, the future Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) Observatory, and the wide-field detectors such as HAWC and LHAASO, should allow to analyze and finally detect such echos, extended emission or pair halos, and to further characterize the IGMF.