Edith Alice Müller Award 2019
The PhD Prize of the Swiss Society for Astrophysics and Astronomy (SSAA) is awarded this year to Oliver Müller for his dissertation on "Small-scale cosmology with dwarf galaxies" conducted at the University of Basel.
The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are each surrounded by a thin plane of satellite dwarf galaxies that may be corotating. Cosmological simulations predict that most satellite galaxy systems are close to isotropic with random motions, so those two well studied systems are often interpreted as rare statistical outliners. Oliver Müller's work shows that corotating satellite systems may be common in the universe, challenging small-scale structure formation in the prevailing cosmological paradigm.
