Editorial - GCNEWS, Vol. 20, March 2005

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



Volume 20, March 2005 - In the News

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In the News - Robin Herrnstein, Joseph Lazio & Sera Markoff

Welcome to the first GCNEWS of 2005! As always, please feel free to contact any of us with GC newsworthy items and/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. With dozens of astro-ph abstracts each day, it is easy for a listing to be overlooked. GCNEWS is a great way to ensure that your paper is noticed by people with an acknowledged interest in GC science. Instructions for abstract submission can be found at: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~gcnews/home/submission.shtml


In this Volume


In this volume, we report on the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society as well as highlight a number of upcoming GC-related conferences.

We are excited to have an invited review article by James Buckley, in which he updates us on very high energy gamma -ray emission from the GC as observed by Whipple, HESS, and CANGAROO. He discusses the most likely sources for the observed emission and looks at prospects for the future including the VERITAS array.

Finally, we've received a number of GC abstracts this winter (but we could always use more!), and they are listed at the end of the issue.


January 2005 AAS Cameos


As usual, there was a strong GC presence at the winter AAS meeting in San Diego (January 9-13). In addition to various papers describing new instruments that may be valuable for future GC research, there were a host of papers summarizing results from current work. We describe briefly those papers with a GC component at the AAS meeting, with apologies to anybody whose work we might have missed. We give the AAS paper number in parentheses at the end of each summary.

Sgr A* attracted a fair amount of attention:

The stars in the GC, and particularly the central stellar cluster, had their share of observations and modelling:

The various phases of the interstellar medium attracted attention from numerous groups:

Finally,


Upcoming GC Meetings



The Paradoxes of Massive Black Holes: 2005 April 14-16

This conference on the Galactic Center will be held at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, 2005 April 14-16. Its focus will be 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. Recent observations have revealed many surprising results on massive stars in the central part of our Galaxy, especially in the vicinity of the supermassive black hole. How these stars form and survive so close to a massive black hole is a major unsolved mystery. Equally remarkable are the observational results on radiation from gas in the vicinity of the massive black hole, including rapid IR and X-ray flaring. The Galactic Center is also one of the most important testing grounds for theoretical models of gas dynamics in the vicinity of black holes. Our goal is to bring together scientists with expertise in the Galactic Center, star formation and stellar dynamics, and accretion disks and jets to discuss these results. We expect a very exciting conference, with adequate time for discussions and debate of the forefront issues in the field.

A list of confirmed speakers is available at the conference website http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/activities/galactic_c05/?id=320. Because of the very limited time for speakers, there are regrettably no opportunities for contributed talks. There will however be several joint discussions and poster sessions where research may be presented. Poster presenters will be able to bring up relevant slides during discussion as well. We strongly encourage attendance from the Galactic Center community. Email Eliot Quataert (eliot@astron.berkeley.edu) if you are interested in giving a poster.

Please register for the conference now at the web address above. If you have any questions, please contact Andrea Ghez (ghez@astro.UCLA.EDU), Sera Markoff (sera@space.mit.edu), or Eliot Quataert (eliot@astron.berkeley.edu).

We hope you can all join us in lovely Santa Barbara.


High Energy Phenomena in the Galactic Center: 2005 June

This conference is organized within the framework of the Institute of Astro-Particle physics and Cosmology workshop 2005 and is intended as an international meeting for in depth discussion of the recent results obtained from the high energy observations of the Galactic Center (GC) region, in particular the results from Chandra, XMM-Newton, INTEGRAL and HESS on the emission from the central few degrees (~ 500 pc) of the Galaxy.

Chandra and XMM-Newton have now drawn the maps of the X-ray emission of the region, with the discovery of a large population of point sources and several bright new transients, with the morphological and spectral (both line and continuum) characterization of the diffuse emission, with the detection of non-thermal shells and filaments and the study of both quiescent and flaring activity of Sgr A*, the GC super massive black hole (SMBH).

INTEGRAL has revealed the presence of emission at energies > 20 keV from the center of the Galaxy and HESS has discovered a TeV source also coincident with the position of Sgr A*. The INTEGRAL and HESS gamma-ray sources are still not unequivocally associated to one of the sources of region and the contribution from the SMBH or other objects in the Sgr A complex is presently a matter of study and discussions. Other sources like G0.9+0.1 have been detected with HESS in the region, while on a much larger scale INTEGRAL is defining the characteristics of the 511 keV line emission from the Galactic bulge.

To disantangle these contributions and understand physical processes taking place in the GC, it is also important to consider results from observations at lower energies, in particular at infrared and radio/sub-mm frequencies. Efforts to perform coordinated multiwavelength observations in particular of Sgr A* have been done in the last years. In 2005 June a number of new results from the 2004 (or even the early 2005) observation campaign will be available and it will be possible to present and discuss all these data and try to assess a number of open questions.

This conference will be dedicated to discussing recent advances on the observations and models of the massive BH, Sgr A*, on the characteristics and origin of the diffuse X-ray emission, the role of the non thermal sources of the region like Sgr A East to the high energy phenomena taking place in the Center of the Galaxy. But we would also like to discuss the implications that the TeV HESS and the 511 keV INTEGRAL observations have on models involving dark matter annihilation or generation of fluxes of neutrinos in the central regions.

The conference is part of the APC workshop. As such its program will favor discussion between astrophysicists, particle physicists and theoreticians and therefore a number of review talks on the main topics are proposed. The talks will be mainly invited reviews (30-40 min.) or solicited contributions (20-30 min.). We can possibly accomodate a few other proposed oral contributions from participants but the program will not be generally open to contributed papers.

The related APC workshop includes a set of lectures and courses for students, post-docs and researchers of the Parisian area. For more information on either the workshop or the conference, please see http://apc-p7.org/HEP_GC/.

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