GCNEWS
A Newsletter for Galactic Center Research
This Volume was edited by Sera Markoff, Loránt Sjouwerman, Joseph Lazio, Cornelia Lang, Rainer Schödel & Robin Herrnstein
email: gcnews@aoc.nrao.edu
GCNEWS
As always, please feel free to contact any of us with GC newsworthy items or future article ideas. We also remind our readers to please submit their abstracts to GCNEWS. As you know, GCNEWS promises rapid delivery of your results to fellow GC researchers. While astro-ph is a valuable resource, GCNEWS directly targets those readers with an acknowledged interest in GC science.
In this volume, we are excited to report on a number of upcoming conferences, including several which are in the very early planning stages for 2006.
We are pleased to have this issue's invited review focused on recent results on the Galactic Center from the very high energy end of the spectrum. Pietro Ubertini, who is the Principal Investigator on the IBIS instrument aboard the INTEGRAL Observatory, has provided us with a nice overview of the observations of the central region of our Galaxy in the gamma ray part of the spectrum over the past 30 years. INTEGRAL has made a strong committment to studying the Galactic Center by devoting significant time to this target and has already made some exciting discoveries.
A hefty number of GC abstracts have come in since July and as always, we encourage you to continue to submit your latest results. Our next issue of GCNEWS will be early in 2005 after the winter American Aastronomical Society meeting---hope to see many of you there!
The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at UC Santa Barbara is planning a three day conference on "The Paradoxes of Massive Black Holes: A Case Study in the Milky Way" during the period of April 14-16, 2005. See http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/activities/conferences for updates regarding the conference. The conference will be focused on the twin puzzles of (1) star formation and the young stellar population in the central parsec of the Galactic Center, and (2) the "luminous" source Sagittarius A* associated with the massive black hole in the Galactic Center. The goal of the meeting is to bring together scientists with expertise in the Galactic Center, star formation and stellar dynamics, and accretion disks and jets to discuss the exciting recent results on the Galactic Center and their broader implications. We expect a very exciting conference, with adequate time for discussions and debate of the forefront issues in the field. There will also be ample opportunity to present posters with current results. Any questions regarding the meeting can be addressed to Andrea Ghez (ghez@astro.ucla.edu), Sera Markoff (sera@space.mit.edu), or Eliot Quataert (eliot@astron.berkeley.edu).
We have started planning for the next Galactic Center conference. It is still very early in the planning stage, but so far we would like to call to your attention that:
Please stay tuned for further news and expect a more formal announcement in Spring 2005.
We have also started thinking about organizing a Joint Discussion (JD) at the next General Assembly of the IAU to be held in Prague in the Czech Republic sometime during 14-26 August of 2006. The focus of this one day JD would also be to broaden our scope from our own Galactic nuclear region to the nuclei of other nearby, similar galaxies. So far we have thought about a combination of talks on the GC and similar low-luminosity active galactic nuclei. We welcome any thoughts or suggestions you may have.