JENAM is the Joint European and National Astronomy Meeting organised each year in one of the European countries jointly by the European Astronomical Society and one of the national astronomical societies. JENAM 2010 has taken place in Lisbon, Portugal during the week of September 6-10 2010. Two members of our Department (Alejandro Bedregal and Carmen Eliche-Moral, in the picture near a model of the NIR space telescope Herschel) have assisted to Session 2 of the JENAM: "Environment and the Formation of Galaxies: 30 years later".

This session reviewed and updated the work of Alan Dressler on the density-morphology relation of galaxies, which established environment as a driving mechanism for galaxy formation and evolution thirty years ago. A poster showing the results of our semi-analytical models on the role of major mergers in the buildup of massive early-type galaxies since z~1 was accepted (PDF file here). The emerging picture is that the stellar mass of a galaxy basically drives the properties of a galaxy (color, morphology), playing environment a secondary role and only at intermediate galaxy masses. However, astrophysicists are still far from getting a whole comprehensive picture of how environmental effects have shaped present-day galaxies.