AAS Tuesday Morning

Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 06:21 AM by Administrator

First impressions of this AAS meeting… it is huge. There are apparently over 3000 registrants which means about 30% of the professional astronomers in the U.S. are likely in attendance at this meeting. The hotel has huge facilities for this, but the posters are scattered across several rooms, which while common at some big shows, can make it difficult to find the posters you are interested in seeing.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday just getting my bearings, collecting toys for the kids from all the vendors. The vendors at AAS meetings tend to be the large astronomical observatories, trying to drive up applications to use their facilities, various divisions of NASA trying to show you what the next great thing is, Aerospace companies, and Publishers. I walked around the poster session floor and picked up pairs of toys for my twins (foam stars, light up keychains, rulers from the U.S. Naval observatory, informing you that light travels one foot in a nanosecond, and my favorite, LED pens which light up as you write.

In addition to collecting knick-knacks, I spent a lot of time looking at posters. Some of the more memorable posters were

• A Midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, Eric Roe, announced the discovery of a large Kuiper Belt Object in the outer solar system (not as large as Pluto, but respectable). In honesty, I have to say Eric’s advisor on the project, Jeff Larsen, is a very good friend of mine, so I spent a lot of time talking to Eric, but it was still an impressive poster.
• Some images of Earth’s Moon shot using the Hubble Space Telescope. This was impressive mostly because you don’t think of Hubble as being capable of working on an object as bright as the moon.
• A poster by Brian Thomas of Washburn University and his collaborators on the effects on Earth of a Supernova going off within 30 parsecs, in a nutshell, kiss the ozone layer goodbye.
• An amazing image of the Magellanic Clouds, the satellite galaxies orbiting earth, constructed from a mosaic of of images from Cerro Tololo International Observatory.
• The sheer wall of posters on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a project that started as a relatively small endeavor and has now ballooned into what is starting to look like the next Sloan Digital Sky Survey, by which I mean over budget, over rated, and behind schedule. Sigh.
• A poster by my colleague, David Williams, on the use of interactive peer instruction in the classroom, seems to have gotten a lot of attention, as his handouts really went quite fast.

Some stories that actually made it into the “main stream media” are:

• Polaris has been resolved: Polaris, the north star, has been known to be a triple star system for quite some time based on its spectra, but the people Hubble Space Telescope has been used to actually resolve the system, an amazing achievement. The NASA Press Release with a link to the images is also online.
• The Warping of the Disk of the Milky Way is being blamed on the motions of Magellanic Clouds, and more specifically, the dark matter in those clouds, in orbit around the galaxy. Another story on this is here
• A Medium-Sized Black Hole which can’t be explained through a single supernova event may have been discovered (actually, I think this has to be the second or third of these guys I have heard of) .
• A cluster of 14 supergiant stars has been discovered. The previously largest cluster was five stars. This has some serious implications for stellar formation models.

I also got in two job interviews (really informal discussions about open positions), so I have to say, very productive. Now its Tuesday morning and I have placed my poster up and I am now waiting for the first talk of the morning (a 45 minute talk on High Energy Cosmic Rays). I spent a busy day yesterday running around the poster session floor looking at other people’s stuff, today, I have to eat my own dog food.

For more blogging from the AAS check out the Slacker Astronomy and Bad Astronomy blogs that are giving a maybe more polished series of reports from the AAS.

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