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CIFIST - Cosmological Impact of the First STars
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The Logo


CIFIST logo big version


The CIFIST logo reperesents a Latimeria Chalumnae, the only surviving species of the Coelacanthus order of fishes. It is a big oceanic fish living in the western Indian Ocean. Coelacanths appeared in the Devonian period and left abundant fossil records until they seemingly disappeared in the Cretaceous period. They were believed to be extinct since about 70 million years, until the first Latimeria were found out the mouth of the Chalumna river (South Africa) in 1938: Latimeria thus became probably the most famous example of "living fossile".
Latimeria was chosen to represent the CIFIST main goal, which is to find and study the "fossil stars" which survived from the very fist ages of the Universe. The shape of the fish and the team name are superimposed over the convective pattern in the photosphere of a metal poor star as simulated by the 3D hydrodynamical modeling code CO5BOLD.
The logo has been drawn by E. Caffau and L. Sbordone.