Starship Asterisk*

The 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) will have its opening reception on Sunday, January 5; related events have already gotten underway, however, including a meeting of an exoplanet research group and a two-day Software Carpentry bootcamp that started today. The science program for the meeting is available in several formats, and as before, there are various ways to follow along -- and get warnings to WASH YOUR HANDS because apparently Seattle has a flu thing going on -- including:

Twitter
(Tweet analysis by Doug Burke is here.)

Press conferences
(You might see a familiar name on that page.)

I will be surprised if no one is live-blogging from the meeting and when I know who is, I will post that information here.

ETA: Overview article about the meeting here: http://www.space.com/28149-astronomy-co ... as225.html

Astrobites are blogging the conference: http://astrobites.org/2015/01/05/astrob ... 225-day-1/

M

Thanks Alice for posting this. It was great to look through the variety of presentations to get a glimpse of what is current in the world of astronomy and physics. To see in a paper that no water has been detected on the surface of 67CG or to see very famous physicists' presenting a testable hypothesis using Bells Inequality to link with cosmic photons http://web.mit.edu/asf/www/MIT_MKI/MIT_MKI_03.10.14.pdf to newly updated planetariums. Quite spectacular, the world of our knowledge of the sky. Maybe next year we'll know if the PHAT jiggles? Thanks again, Ron

Margarita, thanks for letting me know Astrobites is live-blogging! I think Astro Computing Today has been doing a bit.

Ron-Astro, there is so much here, it's hard to know what to go to. I am so glad I remembered to restock my travel bottle of ibuprofen, because everything hurts, and I didn't even go to the AAS party last night! Most of my time has been spent in the exhibit hall, as I had posters up on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Monday, I attended an interesting session titled Astronomy in Africa II, this is follow-up to a session held last year that a sick cat had prevented me from attending, and the AAS Publishing Town Hall after a quick and intestinally unfortunate dinner meeting. Between them, I was in the exhibit hall to see what cool swag snag editors and publishers for one of Tuesday's meetings, and attend a NASA presentation at which the gorgeous new images of the Pillars of Creation were displayed. There was applause!! (That NIR image is a knockout!) Tuesday, breakfast meeting (not with publications people), exhibit hall, a special session on software licensing that I'd organized, another meeting (with publications people and interested others), and then more poster before Open Mic night -- poetry, spoken word, and lots of music, including a folksong from a Nepalese astronomy student. Yesterday was all exhibit hall except for a short NASA meeting in the morning.

Today is Hack Day, but I'll spend most of my time in the exhibit hall and sessions instead. Closing reception is this evening; I hope I'm awake for it!

I have only just discovered that The Hubble Space Telescope YouTube channel has been doing live hangouts several times a day from the conference. (I don't check my subscribed channels often enough!)
Here is the first of, I think, nine.
This is the URL of the playlist

Also, the Seattle Astronomical Society have been blogging the conference.

Margarita

PS. @Ron - you mentioned water and Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Were you referring to what Paul R. Weissman wrote here?

Back to the Beginning: The Rosetta Mission at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
No evidence of ice has been found on the nucleus surface to date, though the gas coma is predominantly water molecules. Perhaps most interesting is the measured bulk density of the nucleus, 0.43 g/cm3, which is less than half the density of water ice and implies a nucleus porosity of 75% or more.

That was fun! And busy, and tiring, and wow, did it go fast!

MargaritaMc wrote:PS. @Ron - you mentioned water and Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Were you referring to what Paul R. Weissman wrote here?

Back to the Beginning: The Rosetta Mission at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
No evidence of ice has been found on the nucleus surface to date, though the gas coma is predominantly water molecules. Perhaps most interesting is the measured bulk density of the nucleus, 0.43 g/cm3, which is less than half the density of water ice and implies a nucleus porosity of 75% or more.

Yes - in quickly going through the abstracts that statement caught my eye. Maybe I am misinterpreting the sentence but it seemed to indicate that no water was "on the surface" of the comet. Perhaps water's property in a vacuum would be that it sublimates to space but it seemed mysterious to me. I'm sure we'll hear more in the future.
Alice – Professional meetings for all of us have grown to such enormous size it's only possible the see the smallest bit of what interests are best served. At the least it's a great rejuvenator for one's professional interests to see all the variety of efforts being made. It was an eye-opener for me to see how little an amateur actually is aware of. Ron

owlice wrote:That was fun! And busy, and tiring, and wow, did it go fast!

I'm envious, owlice - it sounds like such a good meeting! (I loved the idea of the "Science Train" outreach lunch time activity - presumably by young and energetic astronomers... It looked cold in Seattle!) @Ron ~ regarding the surface composition of comets, Wikipedia is helpful here

... they are popularly described as "dirty snowballs" after Fred Whipple's model.[11] However, some comets may have a higher dust content, leading them to be called "icy dirtballs".[12]

The surface of the nucleus is generally dry, dusty or rocky, suggesting that the ices are hidden beneath a surface crust several metres thick.

About sublimation, Swinburne University notes

Sublimation occurs in many places in the Solar System. Two examples are:

• The sublimation of water from cometary nuclei as the comet approaches the Sun’
• The sublimation of the polar ice caps on Mars during the Martian summer.

Also, this article in Astronomy Today is a helpful summary about comets, though it's not recent enough to mention 67P/C-G.

BTW, I did Dr Mike Brown's amazing Science of the Solar System course last year on the Coursers MOOC platform. He is offering it again this year and I recommend it highly. https://www.coursera.org/course/solarsystem

Margarita

Ron, certainly the AAS meetings are very large! The other astro meetings I have attended are much smaller. Some day, I will attend an AAS meeting with a goal of going to the science sessions. The AAS press conferences are informative and I wish I had attended more of them.

Margarita, it was fairly mild in Seattle; definitely warmer than home! DC has had very cold weather all week, though it was above freezing yesterday. (It's below freezing now and I've got frozen pipes, oh joy and rapture.) The Science Train activity was started in NYC; its perpetrator has recently moved to Chicago and has started doing that outreach there, too, and is trying to spread the idea, hence the attempt at the meeting. And whether the participants were all young depends upon one's point of view, of course.

It was an excellent meeting! AAS meetings are typically held twice a year, January and June, but there is no summer meeting this year as the US is hosting the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) General Assembly this August. The General Assembly is held every three years for two weeks, and this next one is being organized by the AAS. (As I'm not a member of the IAU, nor even eligible for membership, I will not be attending the General Assembly; I've never attended a summer AAS meeting, either.)

owlice wrote
And whether the participants were all young depends upon one's point of view, of course.

Anyone under 65 is a stripling youth from my POV...

Then yes, from your POV, all the participants (that I know of) were young!

To all that were there, did anyone notice any planetary nebula related abstracts or announcements? Also am I possibly the only one in the world that can say that stardeath makes me feel alive?!

starsurfer: http://files.aas.org/aas225/aas225_block_schedule.pdf

Search for "nebula."

You're welcome.

owlice wrote:starsurfer: http://files.aas.org/aas225/aas225_block_schedule.pdf

Search for "nebula."

You're welcome.

Thank you owlice, you're so nice! Now if only I could have actually been there.