Volume 11, May 2000 - EDITORIAL

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Almost two years have passed since GC98, our last Galactic Center Workshop, and we are wondering when and where the next GC meeting is going to be? Significant progress has been made recently towards understanding numerous problems in the Galactic Center: the orbits of the stars with measured proper motions around Sgr A* are being determined, both linear and circular polarization of Sgr A* has been measured (see article in this issue), Chandra X-Ray results are soon to be officially released, and the recently commissioned Gemini is devoting one of two demonstration science programs to the GC, to name just a few. In addition, the last conference concentrated on the inner parsecs, and meanwhile significant progress has been made on the larger scale structure.

Since we know from experience that a conference takes at least a year to plan, we are sending out a "call for a meeting", to see if someone will take up the gauntlet and commit to hosting our next meeting. The GCNEWS team will help to publicize the meeting, and provide a conduit to the community. You may have noticed we have not (yet) volunteered to organize the meeting. For any of you who have organized meetings, this should come as no surprise. We are still recovering from the last one, so although we are not particularly anxious to organize the next meeting ourselves, we are happy to provide input.

So, who's it going to be? We have had a string of very good conferences: 1989 at UCLA, 1993 in Ringberg, 1996 in Chile, 1997 at Kyoto and of course 1998 in Arizona. Certainly we have not exhausted all the possibilities! So, we look forward to learning the date and location of the next GC conference.

We point out that there will be a summer school for students ``Galactic Black Hole 2001'' about astrophysics and general relativity in August 2001 hosted by the German Physical Society (DPG) in Germany. It will mainly revolve around the Galactic Center and is open to international students. The scientific organization is in the hands of F.W. Hehl (University of Cologne) and H. Falcke (MPIfR Bonn), and a number of well-known GC researchers and teachers have been enlisted, as well as several scientists working on general relativity. For more information see the last side of this issue or the preliminary webpage at http://www.thp.Uni-Koeln.DE/BH2001/.

As mentioned above, the invited article in this issue gives a brief review of the polarization properties of Sgr A*. This is a hot new topic which emerged out of the blue in the last year, after having laid dormant for almost two decades. Following the initial work by Bower et al. (presented in Vol. 10) in this issue we are featuring new results on linear polarization at even higher frequencies (Aitken et al.) and the first attempts for a theoretical interpretation (Quataert & Gruzinov; Agol).

As you know, we have solicited brief review articles on a well-defined topic or short original research articles by a GC expert for each issue of GCNEWS. So far we have been successful in providing our readers with the latest exciting results. For example, the flux and properties of the gamma-ray `point' source at the Galactic Center were first published in GCNEWS (Vol. 4, Mattox) and the history of how GC sources got their name can only be found here (Vol. 2, Palmer & Goss). The short research articles featuring OH masers (Vol. 8, Yusef-Zadeh), the lesser-known military satellite NIR images of the GC (Vol. 5, Shipman et al.), and new VLT results on GC stars (Eckart et al., Vol. 10), have provided worthwhile reading without taking up too much of everyones valuable time. All the articles are now featured in ADS and hence are available to a wider audience. We will try to continue this tradition and may be approaching any one of our readers for the next issue: however, we are certainly open to volunteers or topic suggestions.