The Warm & Hot Universe

Workshop:
May 7-9, 2008
Columbia University
New York City

Conference Poster

Surveys of the sky over the last decade have revealed that the composition of the Universe is largely unknown to us. Even half of the baryons - the minor constituent of the Universe that we do understand - are missing at low redshifts. The standard LCDM model, which came into being principally as a result of the abundance of high precision data at microwave and optical wavelengths, is rife with unanswered questions, ranging from the nature and evolution of the dark energy, or cosmic repulsion, through the disposition of the missing baryons, to the distribution of dark matter, or role of modified gravity, in clusters, groups and galaxies. This meeting will address these issues from both theoretical and observational perspectives, with an emphasis on how we can resolve them.

Sponsoring Institutions:
	Goddard Space Flight Center

Main topics to be covered

• Missing baryons at low redshift and in clusters
• The Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM)
• Non-thermal heating, cosmic feedback, excess Entropy and Li-6
• Thermal and non-thermal cluster soft X-ray excess; the hard excess
• Evolution and scaling properties of clusters
• Sunyaev-Zel'dovich surveys
• X-ray gas parameters of groups and their evolution
• Mass profile of groups
• AGN surveys and galaxy formation
• Interstellar and interplanetary medium.
• Particle acceleration and interactions in the heliosphere.