AAAS Science Symposia
American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting
17 February 2012 - 08:00 – 09:30 a.m. PST
Vancouver, British Columbia
New Frontiers in the Radio Universe: Protoplanetary Disks to the Far Universe
Symposium Description:
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) are new and transformational international research facilities with sensitivity, resolution, frequency coverage, and image quality that exceed those of existing astronomy facilities at centimeter to submillimeter wavelength facilities by up to two orders of magnitude. Both ALMA and EVLA are enabling multinational teams to open new scientific frontiers, dramatically expanding the discovery space that astronomers can explore, and yielding fresh insights across much of modern astrophysics, from the molecular clouds and protoplanetary disk systems where new stars and planets form, to the stellar nurseries in the Milky Way and other galaxies, to the most distant galaxies and quasars. ALMA is an international partnership of Europe, Japan, and North America in cooperation with the Republic of Chile, where the array is located at 5000m elevation in the northern Andes. Located on the San Agustin Plains of central New Mexico, the EVLA is a North American partnership, with the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the National Science Foundation as the lead partner, and additional key contributions provided by the National Research Council in Canada, and the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia Tecnologia in Mexico.
Organizer
Mark T. Adams, National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Speakers
David J. Wilner, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Christine Wilson, McMaster University
Kartik Sheth, National Radio Astronomy Observatory
American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting
19 February 2012 - 01:00 – 02:30 p.m. PST
Vancouver, British Columbia
Pulsars: Astronomical Gifts That Keep on Giving
Symposium Description:
Pulsars are extraordinarily rich natural laboratories that are being used by astronomers to innovatively explore the fundamental physics of extreme states of matter, probe the regime of strong gravity, precisely test the predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and much more. Pulsars are neutron stars, exotic astronomical objects that are one of the possible endpoints of stellar evolution for stars more massive than the Sun. First discovered in 1967, pulsars are very dense stellar objects that rotate up to 750 times per second, are about 20 kilometers in diameter, and emit narrow, lighthouse-like beams of radiation that can be observed by radio telescopes if their beams sweep through the line-of-sight to the Earth. The relatively rare and very fast “millisecond pulsars” may provide an opportunity to directly detect gravitational waves from the near and distant universe and inaugurate the field of gravitational wave astronomy. An international team of astronomers is now building a precision, galactic scale gravitational wave detector that observes a sample of millisecond pulsars and times their individual pulses with a precision of tens to hundreds of nanoseconds.
Organizer
Mark T. Adams, National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Speakers
Ingrid Stairs, University of British Columbia
Scott M. Ransom, National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Benjamin Stappers, Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester
