The importance of being a weighted blow-up

Blow-ups are fundamental tools in algebraic geometry, and there are several results (e.g the famous Castelnuovo's theorem) that can be used to determine when a variety is obtained as a blow-up of a smooth variety along a smooth center. Weighted blow-ups play a similar role for stacks. In this talk I will present a criterion for finding out if a smooth DM stack is a weighted blow-up. I will apply this result for showing that certain alternative compactifications of moduli of marked elliptic curves are obtained via weighted blow-ups (and blow-downs). This in turn will prove to be useful in order to compute certain invariants, like Chow rings or Brauer groups. First part of this talk is a joint work with Arena, Inchiostro, Mathur, Obinna and Pernice; the second part of this talk is a joint work with L. Battistella.