Mixing in the radiative zones of stars is one of the least well understood components of stellar evolution, and yet can, in many instances, play a crucial role. In recent years, however, much progress has been made in quantifying mixing by a variety of hydrodynamic instabilities, thanks to numerical experiments that have strongly benefited from advances in supercomputing. I will review the state of the field, and present perspectives on what can and should be done next by the stellar evolution community, and by the astrophysical fluid dynamics community.

The interstellar medium (ISM) of galaxies drives galaxy evolution. However, it???s multi-phase structure is typically unresolved in cosmological galaxy formation simulations. I present recent progress on high-resolution numerical simulations (the SILCC project) investigating the differential impact of major physical processes setting the chemical and thermal multi-phase structure of the ISM including OB stellar winds, radiation and supernova explosions. We find evidence that stellar winds and radiation from massive stars primarily regulate star formation, while supernova explosions set the properties of the outflow driving hot gas. I also discuss the potential impact of non-thermal ISM components - magnetic fields and cosmic rays - on galactic outflows. With these simulations we also make first attempts towards more accurate predictions of important emission lines which are a major observables for galaxy formations studies at all cosmic epochs.

Accretion onto neutron stars and black holes powers the most luminous phenomena in the Universe. Associated to it is the existence of outflows, in the form of uncollimated winds or highly collimated relativistic jets. The origin of outflows and their feedback to the environment is one of the most debated topics in astrophysics today. In this talk I will review the current understanding of winds in X-ray binaries, their launching mechanism and their relation to specific accretion states. I will also discuss the potential interplay between the appearance/disappearance of winds and jets and the insight gained with ongoing observational programmes focused on the variability of such phenomena.

Most star clusters are collisional systems, i.e. their two-body relaxation timescale is shorter than their lifetime. This simple fact has strong implications: intense dynamical processes occur during the entire evolution of a star cluster, shaping both its structural properties and its stellar content. Mass segregation and Spitzer instability imprint their features already in the early stages of star cluster evolution, leading to repeated collisions of massive stars. This process might lead to the formation of very massive stars (>150 Msun) and even intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs, 100-1000 Msun), depending on star cluster metallicity. Moreover, binary systems undergo frequent three-body encounters and even dynamical exchanges, which lead to dynamical ejections and/or the formation of more and more massive binaries. These aspects are crucial for the demography of massive double black hole binaries, which are important sources of gravitational waves for both ground-based and space-borne detectors. Finally, one of the most important (but less studied) ingredients of star cluster dynamics is the role of gas during star cluster formation. I show that torques in the parent molecular cloud imprint a substantial amount of rotation to embedded star clusters, potentially affecting their further evolution.

The Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) gravitational-wave detector this year reported the discovery of the first direct detection of gravitational waves confirming Einstein's Theory of General Relativity in its extreme limit. All sources of these gravitational waves detected so far were caused by the merging of two massive stellar-mass black holes. In this talk I will first summarize the main aLIGO results and then discuss in detail the three main channels that have been proposed to explain their origin, involving (1) dynamical formation, (2) common-envelope evolution, and (3) chemical homogeneous evolution (CHE), and how it may be possible to distinguish among these models. I will then focus on the CHE formation model, showing recent results from our own work, including cosmological simulations and their implications for the future detection of intermediate-mass black-hole mergers, gamma-ray bursts, pair-instability supernovae and neutron-star/black-hole mergers. The model also has application to ultra-luminous X-ray sources, in particular the most luminous ones.

A 2-3 million year old 60Fe-signal was detected in Pacific deep-sea
geological archives and in lunar samples. This long-lived isotope is not
produced on Earth, however, it is generated in massive stars and ejected
during supernova explosions. We have found that this signal is extended
in time and is present in marine reservoirs around the globe. A second
6.5-8.7 Myr old signature was revealed in a manganese crust. The recent
injection of 60Fe into the solar system coincides with the formation of
the Local Bubble, a large cavity in the interstellar medium produced by
multiple supernovae, which surrounds our solar system. The most likely
sources are stellar explosions within a moving group that passed the
solar vicinity, and whose surviving members are now in the
Scorpius-Centaurus stellar association. With analytical and numerical
models generating the Local Bubble, we explain the younger
60Fe-signature and link the recent evolution of the solar neighborhood
to the terrestrial anomalies.

The variation of the Sun's rotation with latitude and depth plays a key role in dynamo theories. Differential rotation is thought to result from the transport of angular momentum by turbulent stresses that arise from rotating convection. Unfortunately these turbulent stresses cannot be computed from first principles, they can only be approximated using simple models or numerical simulations. Helioseismology offers the possibility of measuring fluctuating velocities near the top of the solar convection zone. I will present HMI/SDO measurements of horizontal Reynolds stresses at different latitudes and at different spatial scales. The observations indicate that a transition in the nature of turbulence occurs between the deep convection zone where convection is strongly constrained by rotation and the near surface layers where it is not.

ESA's Planck mission has recently delivered on its promise to obtain ~few percent level constraints on the fundamental parameters of the standard model of cosmology, the LambdaCDM model. In spite of commonly-made claims that "all is well", detailed comparisons to other datasets are beginning to reveal some interesting tensions. Some measurements of local large-scale structure (LSS) in particular appear at odds with the CMB results. A few recent studies have proposed massive neutrinos as a way to reconcile the CMB and LSS measurements. However, before arriving at such a strong conclusion (or adopting any other modification of the standard model) we must be certain that we have properly dealt with all important sources of systematic error. Precisely modelling large-scale structure is challenging in particular, due to the non-negligible effects of feedback processes associated with galaxy formation. Here I present the first results from a new large hydrodynamical simulation campaign (BAHAMAS - BAryons and HAloes of MAssive Systems) designed specifically for LSS cosmology purposes and that realistically captures the effects of feedback on LSS. A number of the simulations include a massive neutrino component. Using virtual observations of the simulations, I re-assess the evidence for tensions between the CMB and various LSS probes, including cosmic shear, CMB lensing, galaxy clustering, the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect and so on. I then show the effects of massive neutrinos on these various LSS tests and discuss the current evidence for and against their cosmological importance.

In 1916, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves but considered them to be too weak to be ever detected. Nonetheless, 100 years after their prediction, and after 50 years of effort, scientists and engineers have succeeded in this challenge, building multi-kilometer laser interferometers capable of measuring length changes close to the Heisenberg uncertainty limit. The first detections of gravitational waves allow us to listen to the ripples of space-time and witness the merging of black holes more than a billion years ago. Gravitational-wave astronomy has started and, together with electromagnetic and neutrino observations, is expected to shed new light on energetic astrophysical events.

While primordial universe was extremely uniform, it is now deeply structured with huge density contrasts from galaxy clusters to planets. This implies that intense episodes of accretion are taken place recursively at all spatial scales. How does it exactly happen and what role are these accretion events playing ? During the talk I will focus on three particular types of objects, namely the molecular clouds, the proto-stellar clusters and the late proto-planetary discs. For each of these three cases, I will describe how accretion proceeds and how it contributes, together with other physical processes, to drive the evolution of the system.

I will talk about how resolved stellar populations can and have been used to study the fossil record of star formation in nearby Local Group galaxies. This requires accurate colours, variability, chemistry and kinematic measurements of large samples of individual stars from deep imaging and spectroscopy. These studies provide a detailed picture of galaxy evolution going back to the earliest times, providing insights into the initial star forming properties of the early Universe, and how these have changed over time.

SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research in Europe) is a second-generation instrument for the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) dedicated to the direct detection and spectral characterization of giant extra-solar planets, which is one of the most exciting but also one of the most challenging areas in modern astronomy due to the very large contrast between the host star and the planet at very small angular separations. SPHERE combines an extreme adaptive optics system, various coronagraphic devices and a suite of focal instruments providing imaging, integral field spectroscopy and polarimetry capabilities in the visible and near-infrared spectral ranges. After almost 10 years of development, SPHERE has been successfully commissioned at the VLT in 2014 and is now offered to the community since April 2015. I will give an overview of the science objectives and main instrument features, review the achieved performances and present a summary of the main results obtained during the first year of operations.

Throughout the history of the universe, shocks and large-scale gas flows have moulded the arms of spiral galaxies, formed the bulges of the most massive galaxies in the universe, fed supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, fueled generation upon generation of new stars, and enriched the intergalactic medium with metals. For local galaxies, we use multi-object integral field spectroscopy to build the largest sample of galaxies with wide 3-dimensional imaging spectroscopy. We combine these results with insights into the early universe probed through gravitational lensing and near-infrared integral field spectroscopy. I will present the latest results from our large local and high-z 3D surveys to understand the relationship between gas inflows, galactic-scale outflows, star-formation, and active galactic nuclei in galaxies as a function of environment and redshift. I will finish by discussing how this field will be transformed with JWST and in the ELT era.

Progress in our understanding of galaxy formation, improved numerical algorithms, and increased computing power have recently lead to a number of impressive large-scale hydrodynamical simulations, which are able to reproduce key observables of the local and higher redshift Universe. These simulations allow us, for the first time, to study the interplay between large-scale structure and galaxy formation in detail. I will present recent results of these efforts and discuss some successes and failures of them.

I will present new results from the first deep ALMA continuum image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), designed to better connect our UV/optical and FIR/mm views of the high-redshift Universe. From a mosaic of 45 ALMA pointings we have constructed a 1.3mm image covering the full 4.5 sq arcmin of the HUDF as previous imaged with WFC3/IR and ACS on Hubble. This new image reaches an rms depth of 35 micro-Jy at a resolution of of 0.7 arcsec. I will describe the design and implementation of this project, and the analysis of the final data product both for source discovery and stacking in the galaxy mass/redshift plane. After presenting our results I will discuss the implications of our findings for our understanding of the 1.3mm background, the mass dependence of star formation and dust obscuration, and the history of cosmic star-formation density. I will close by discussing the prospects for future progress.

Neutron stars offer a unique environment in which to develop and test theories of the strong force. Densities in neutron star cores can reach up to ten times the density of a normal atomic nucleus, and the stabilising effect of gravitational confinement permits long-timescale weak interactions. This generates matter that is neutron-rich, and opens up the possibility of stable states of strange matter, something that can only exist in neutron stars. Strong force physics is encoded in the Equation of State (EOS), the pressure-density relation, which links to macroscopic observables such as mass M and radius R via the stellar structure equations. By measuring and inverting the M-R relation we can recover the EOS and diagnose the underlying dense matter physics.

One very promising technique for simultaneous measurement of M and R exploits hotspots (burst oscillations) that form on the neutron star surface when material accreted from a companion star undergoes a thermonuclear explosion (a Type I X-ray burst). As the star rotates, the hotspot gives rise to a pulsation. Relativistic effects then encode information about M and R into the pulso profile. However the mechanism that generates burst oscillations remains unknown, 20 years after their discovery. Ignition conditions, flame spread, and the magnetohydrodynamics of the star's ocean all play a role. I will review the progress that we are making towards cracking this long-standing problem, and establishing burst oscillations as a tool par excellence for measuring M and R. This is a major goal for future large-area hard X-ray telescope concepts such as eXTP and LOFT.

Soon after the formulation of Special Relativity in 1905 Einstein started to think about the problem of how gravity would fit into this new concept of a unified space-time structure. Whereas Special Relativity was perfectly tailored to fit Maxwell's electrodynamics, it was totally unclear how the only other fundamental interaction known by then, gravity, cold be reconciled with the requirements of Special Relativity. After some failed attempts Einstein came quite soon to the conclusion that gravity was irreconcilable with Special Relativity and proposed to subsume gravity, inertia, and space-time geometry into a single mathematical representation. It might seem like a miracle that Einstein succeeded to actually perform this almost freely floating construction. In my talk I will try to elucidate in a pedagogical fashion the physical, mathematical, philosophical, and epistemological guiding principles that served Einstein over the ten years 1905-1915 of "hiking in path-less terrain" to find what is now one of the most successful theories in all of physics: General Relativity.

A fundamental goal in observational cosmology is to understand the link between the luminous properties of galaxies and the dark matter halos in which they reside. A precise understanding of the key mechanisms that determine the growth, evolution, and global properties of galaxies has eluded astronomers for more than half a century. Dark matter is thought to play a key role in setting the conditions that determine galaxy properties but the exact details of how dark matter influences galaxy formation remains a topic of active debate. Weak lensing, which relies simply on the laws of gravity, is a unique method that can be used to directly probe the dark matter components of galaxies. While previous weak lensing surveys have been modest, reaching at most a few hundred square degrees, the state-of-the art in this field is changing dramatically with surveys such as the Hyper Suprime Cam (HSC) survey, an ambitious multi-wavelength (g,r,i,z,y) weak-lensing program to map out 1500 square degrees of the sky with the 8.2m Subaru Telescope to i???26 mag. Euclid, WFIRST and LSST will follow in less than a decade. In this talk, I will discuss new frontiers that are opening up with these expanded data-sets. New programs that will soon be within reach include detailed studies of the interconnected assembly histories of massive galaxies and dark matter, lensing-based constraints on the inner profiles of dark matter halos and possibly also of the stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF), and direct measurements of the halo masses of dwarf galaxies.

I will describe recent results from the Palomar Cosmic Web Imager (PCWI). These include the discovery of filamentary Lyman alpha emission and a giant (>120 kpc) protogalactic disk around a QSO, filamentary emission and a large gas proto-disk with possible spiral inflow near a second QSO, and filamentary emission around and kinematics in a Lyman Alpha Blob consistent with a large rotating gas disk. The discovery of filamentary and disk-like structures is evidence for cold accretion inflows with significant angular momentum. I will also describe future instrumentation exploring IGM emission on the ground and in space.

Understanding how star clusters form and evolve has crucial implications for many areas of astrophysics, from star and planet formation, to the history of the Galactic thin disc field star population.
The coming few years will witness a revolution in this research area.
The Gaia mission will indeed soon provide exquisite proper motions and parallaxes for several nearby star clusters, allowing us to test different proposed scenarios.
In a parallel effort, in the last 4-5 years a number of spectroscopic
surveys have been started, providing complementary information to Gaia astrometry. In this context, I will show how Gaia-ESO, a large public spectroscopic survey carried out with FLAMES on the VLT, is already making a significant contribution to the field.
Specifically, I will focus on some of the recent findings from the survey, which shed new light on our current understanding of cluster formation and early evolution, and suggest that the dynamical properties of nearby young clusters are more complex than previously thought.

The dynamics of dark matter provides the backbone of studies of cosmic structure formation. Despite our ignorance about the particle physics nature of the elusive dark matter, its microscopic properties leave a distinct imprint on its macroscopic dynamics which can be studied in computer simulations. Such N-body simulations have driven most of our theoretical knowledge about the distribution of matter in the Universe which in turn reflects properties of the dark matter particle. I will review the theoretical assumptions underlying such simulations and how they are used to study the nature of dark matter through its dynamics. I will particularly focus on recent attempts to model dark matter in the continuum limit. I will demonstrate how such new methods can be used to overcome known problems of N-body simulations, but also help to gain completely new insights into dark matter dynamics. Finally, I will report on recent results on the formation and evolution of the very first haloes in cold dark matter cosmologies.

The Large Area Telescope on the Fermi satellite sees gamma-ray pulsations from over two hundred pulsars: the largest class of GeV sources in the Milky Way. Their diverse properties -- radio loud versus quiet, young versus old, luminosity versus spindown power, and so on -- constrain emission models.

A simple population model helps to better understand their contributions to Galactic ecology. I will describe the current gamma-ray pulsar sample, highlighting some recent discoveries and some ongoing debates.

The discovery of extrasolar planets has revealed an unexpected diversity among planetary systems.
Our Solar System appears to be a "minority case", given that about 75% of the stars seem to have planets with characteristics that are absent in our own system.
Understanding the origin of such a diversity is a major goal in planet formation and evolution models.

An enormous amount of what we know about the universe and our own place on Earth depends on our understanding of stars. Yet, even for the most familiar stars, there are still major unsolved questions related to rotation, magnetic activity, and mass loss. I will discuss an emerging self-consistent picture that links all of these processes together and to the overall evolution of Sun-like and low-mass stars. This progress is due to large and diverse new datasets, advances in physical models for the loss of angular momentum (which itself depends upon magnetism and mass loss), and the incorporation of these models into long-term stellar evolution calculations.

Using new very deep Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray observations of nearby galaxy clusters we are obtaining an unprecedented view of the intracluster medium in the cores of these objects. Rather than purely symmetric hydrostatic atmospheres, we see dynamic places where multiple physical processes are important, including AGN feedback, gas sloshing, mergers, sound waves, turbulence, enrichment and plasma instabilities. I will review some interesting results from the launch of these satellites and show some recent results from deep observations of the Centaurus, Coma and Perseus galaxy clusters.

The search for organic material and biosignatures on Mars is a highly complex endeavor and scientists are at odds when it comes to evaluate the chances for detecting life on Mars. Past conditions of Mars may have allowed life to develop. In particular, the earliest liquid-water rich era would present the most habitable conditions. For life to develop, chemical raw materials are necessary, hence space missions that investigate the composition of comets and asteroids and in particular their organic content provide major opportunities to determine the prebiotic reservoirs available to the early Earth and Mars. Endogenous production of organic material on Mars may have proceeded through similar mechanisms as suggested for the early Earth. Life on Earth originated approximately 3.5 billion years ago and has adapted to nearly every explored environment. Today, the Martian surface is cold, dry and hostile. A combination of solar ultraviolet radiation and oxidation processes in the soil are destructive to organic material and life on and close to the surface. However, the progress and the revolutionary quality and quantity of data on "extreme life" on Earth have transformed our view of habitability beyond Earth. Mars is still the central object of interest for habitability studies and life detection beyond Earth and can be visited frequently by robotic spacecrafts, paving the way for returned samples and human exploration. Extensive science activities in support of Mars exploration are performed worldwide in the laboratory, in the field and through simulation studies. This lecture will highlight data from past and current Mars missions and discuss the science and technology that supports robotic efforts investigating habitability and biosignatures on Mars.

Gravitational lensing provides powerful means to study dark energy and dark matter in the Universe. In particular, strong lens systems with measured time delays between the multiple images can be used to determine the "time-delay distance" to the lens, which is primarily sensitive to the Hubble constant, whose measurement is crucial for inferring properties of dark energy. I will describe the ingredients and newly developed techniques for measuring accurately time-delay distances with a realistic account of systematic uncertainties. A program initiated to measure the Hubble constant to < 4% in precision from gravitational lens time delays is in progress, and I will present the first results and their implications. Current and upcoming imaging surveys will contain thousands of new time-delay lenses, and I will describe ongoing efforts to find these objects. An exciting discovery is the first strongly lensed supernova, which has offered a rare opportunity to perform a true blind test of model predictions. I will describe the bright prospects of using gravitational lens time delays as an independent and competitive cosmological probe.

Dark matter makes up roughly 80% of the matter in the universe, yet the details of its particle nature remain unknown. Many particle dark matter candidates can pair annihilate to produce Standard Model particles, including gamma-ray photons, charged particles, and neutrinos, providing a means of indirectly detecting this elusive component of the universe. In recent years an excess of gamma rays from the Inner Galaxy in the Fermi LAT data has been identified. This emission has been interpreted as a possible signature of the annihilation of dark matter particles. I will review these recent results, and discuss possible ways to confirm a dark matter signal, including the potential of multi-wavelength searches.

I will discuss the predictions of the theory of quantum origin of the universe structure and their experimental verification.

I will present recent efforts to understand early cluster formation phases in the distant Universe, when the first giant dark matter halos were growing, and baryons falling into their deep potential wells took part to prodigiously vigorous activity of galaxy and black hole assembly. These phases are expected to be crucial to understand the processes leading to the formation of dominant elliptical population and well relaxed hot gas atmospheres, as observed in local massive galaxy clusters. New observations with ALMA, NOEMA, Herschel, HST and Keck of two dense structures at z=2 and 2.5 provide new insights into these problematics. Euclid, Athena, ALMA, SKA, JWST, Keck CWI (a bluer MUSE!), and the ELT(s) hold the promise to revolutionise this field in the coming decades.

In August 2014 Rosetta arrived at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a more than 10 years journey through the inner planetary system. Since then, the spacecraft explores the comet and its immediate neighbourhood with its instruments, and on 12 November 2014 it deployed the Philae lander to the nuclear surface. In September 2016 the mission will end with the soft landing of the orbiter on a comet. The Rosetta and Philae investigations focus on the nucleus surface and its interior, the composition of the cometary ice and dust, the physical processes in the cometary environment, and the cometary activity and how it works. The overall connecting science goal is the message, comets can provide on the origin of the solar and planetary system and whether and how comets are linked to water and life on Earth. More than half way through the mission, results on several scientific objectives are available providing new insights in planetary science with comets.

Large galaxy surveys have been a driving force in developing our understanding of galaxy evolution for more than two decades. Their role is to systematically characterise galaxies as a function of key parameters and to disentangle the complex interplay between dark matter, stars, gas, dust and AGN. While much of the action in galaxy evolution happens at redshifts > 1, the value of low-redshift surveys lies in the comprehensiveness and statistical power with which they are able to describe the end product of galaxy evolution. In this talk I will review a selection of results from the recently completed Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey. GAMA combines an extensive spectroscopic survey with imaging data from seven ground-based facilities and four space missions in order to construct a unique multi-wavelength data set covering all major galaxy constituents. I will present results concerning the galaxy stellar mass function, the halo masses and mass-to-light ratios of galaxies and groups, the star formation rate and the build-up of stellar mass through mergers.