The Stellar Content of Local Group Galaxies: IAU Symposium 19211Conference was held in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1998 September. Proceedings will be edited by P. A. Whitelock and R. D. Cannon and published in the ASP Conference Series.

Abstract

IAU Symposium 192 was both broader and narrower than its title would suggest. As will be discussed below, this meeting covered many aspects of the Local Group other than stellar content. On the other hand, discussion of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) was cut back, since a previous IAU Symposium (190) on the Magellanic Clouds had been held only 2 months earlier in Victoria, Canada. Local Group membership.—A substantial portion of the conference was devoted to the fundamental question of Local Group (LG) membership, with review papers by both E. K. Grebel and T. E. Armandroff touching on this subject. In the last year the number of known companions to M31 has doubled, thanks to work by Armandroff, I. D. Karachentsev, and collaborators. The Armandroff search is based on a matched filter applied to the Digital Sky Survey and has produced many more candidates that are still being investigated. However, all the new LG objects to date are brighter than , M 10 v suggesting that many other fainter galaxies are lurking, waiting to be discovered. (Contrast this work on M31 companions with a search by M. Irwin and collaborators, who have turned up only one new object after searching two-thirds of the sky.) On several occasions it was remarked that NGC 55 (which is usually considered to be a member of the nearby Sculptor Group) lies on the zero velocity surface of the Local Group and may actually be considered a member of our Group. (A recent preprint by H. Jerjen et al. [astro-ph/9809046] suggests that it may be more appropriate to consider the Local and Sculptor Groups as a single supergalactic structure.) A related question is that of the luminosity function of the Local Group. If the inventory of LG galaxies is not complete below 10, then one cannot rule out the possibility of a steep upturn in the LG luminosity function (as observed in some other samples of galaxy populations). Morphology.—Sidney Van den Bergh highlighted the absence of large dwarf spheroidals (such as those in the Virgo cluster or the one known in the M81 Group). K. Freeman pointed out the difference in the structure of bulges in earlytype systems (e.g., M31, the Sombrero galaxy, etc.) that possess