Volume 22, November 2005 - In the News

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Things are certainly moving fast in the GC community. This rapid pace is clearly evidenced by the TWENTY SIX (!) new GC abstracts included in this month's newsletter. With all of this progress, it is certainly time for GC-ers to get together and discuss our results face-to-face. Luckily, 2006 is starting to look like the ``Year of the GC Meetings,'' with four GC-related meetings occuring next summer. We have full announcements of all four of these meetings in the following section of this newsletter. In particular, it is time to dust off your GC-caps and prepare for that once-every-4-year ritual: the Galactic Center Workshop! GC2006 will be held in Bad Honnef, Germany next June. So get to work polishing up your theories and reducing your data, and don't forget to register for next summer's conferences!

The Galactic Center Workshop 2006 will be devoted to the presentation and discussion of the most recent observational and theoretical results on the center of the Milky Way and on other low-luminosity galactic nuclei in the local neighborhood. It will continue the tradition of the previous Galactic Center (GC) workshops, 1998 in Tucson, Arizona, and 2002 in Kona, Hawaii. While the main emphasis of the workshop will be clearly set on the center of the Milky Way, as a new feature in GC 2006, there will be a widening of the perspective to include other nearby low-luminosity galactic nuclei as well. This will serve to apply the detailed knowledge that has been gathered so far on the center of our own Galaxy to other systems as well as to place the center of the Milky Way into the broader context of quiescent/low-luminosity galactic nuclei. The latter will be especially important for topics such as accretion and emission mechanisms of highly under-luminous central black holes or the role and mechanisms of massive star formation in galactic nuclei.

GC 2006 is going to take place from 18-22 April 2006, with 17 April and 23 April as arrival and departure dates. Location of the conference is the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef. The Physikzentrum Bad Honnef has been serving as the main meeting point of the German Physical Society (DPG) since 1976. It offers a secluded setting for research conferences, seminars, and workshops. The mansion housing the Physikzentrum is located in the small town of Bad Honnef, at the foot of the Siebengebirge ("the Seven Hills") on the right bank of the Rhine river south of Bonn, about 40 km south of Koeln. Due to the limited capacity of the conference center in Bad Honnef and in order to provide a good atmosphere for discussions and scientific exchange, there will be a hard upper limit of 120 participants.

Registration:

Due to the limited number of participants, the following procedure has been adopted for registration: There is an obligatory pre-registration open from November 15 until December 31. At pre-registration, potential participants provide information on whether they would like to present a talk or a poster, together with a preliminary short abstract (there is also an option for "no presentation"). Based on this information, the SOC/LOC will select presentations relevant to the topic of the workshop. Accepted participants will be forwarded a link with the instructions for final registration and payment of the confrence fee until January 31. A secondary criterion for acceptance will be the time point of registration, therefore early registration is recommended. Please be also aware that due to the time constraints of the workshop also the final decision on the form of the presentation will be taken by the SOC/LOC.

For registration as well as further and more detailed information, please visit http://www.ph1.uni-koeln.de/GC06/ or contact us at gc2006@ph1.uni-koeln.de

The symposium will focus on "mapping" the interstellar media and other components in galactic disks, bulges, halos, and central regions of galaxies. Thanks to recent progress in observations using radio interferometers and optical/infrared telescopes in ground and space, our knowledge on structures of our Galaxy and nearby galaxies has been growing for the last decade. Yet we do not fully understand the physics behind the observational results, and a number of questions still remain : What is the origin of spiral structure?; How should the global star formation rate be determined?; What causes the differences between our Galaxy and other nearby galaxies?; What differentiates galaxies with starburst/AGN activity from normal galaxies?

In the next decade, we will have next-generation instruments, such as ALMA, JWST, TMT, OWL, SPICA, etc.. With these telescopes, complete multi-wavelength data at high resolution will become available on the structures in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies. It is therefore good timing to have a comprehensive discussion on what has been learned so far, what are the major outstanding issues, and how we can physically understand them.

Recent numerical modeling of galaxies is much more realistic; such modeling has become an essential tool in understanding and testing physical interpretations of observational results. In this sense, this symposium is also an excellent occasion for observers and theorists to exchange results.

The symposium will cover the following topics, mainly focusing on mapping observations and related observational and theoretical studies.

1. Our Galaxy - mass distribution (spiral arms, stellar bar and halo), global and local ISM, supermassive black holes and its environment at the center
2. Central part of nearby galaxies - ISM around starbursts, AGNs, fueling mechanism
3. Nearby Galaxies - molecular gas distribution and star formation, gas dynamics, origin of starburst
4. Galactic environment and evolution - formation of our Galaxy, environmental effect on galactic morphology, origin of supermassive blackholes
5. The Nature of the Dark Matter component and its effects on the internal structures of galaxies

This symposium is also planned in celebration of Professor Yoshiaki Sofue's 63th birthday and his retirement from the University of Tokyo. Although Prof. Sofue has worked mainly in the field of radio astronomy, the subjects in this conference reflect the wide range of research in which he has been active in over the past four decades.

For more information, see http://www.ioa.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/galaxy2006/

In the past, they were recognized as the most destructive force in nature. Now, following a cascade of astonishing discoveries, supermassive black holes have undergone a dramatic shift in paradigm. Astronomers are finding out that these objects may have been critical to the formation of structure in the early universe, spawning bursts of star formation, planets, and even life itself. They may have contributed as much as half of all the radiation produced after the Big Bang, and at least 300 million of them may now be lurking through the vast expanses of the observable cosmos. The most accessible among them appears to be lurking at the Center of our own Galaxy.

This meeting will bring together astronomers, astrophysicists, and general relativistis now working at the forefront of supermassive black hole research with the goal of furthering our understanding of the formation and evolution of these intriguing objects.

For more information, see http://qso.lanl.gov/meetings/meet2006/index.html

Next year's IAU meeting will see a number of discussions on the Galactic Center:

• Invited Discourse 4: Reinhard Genzel: ``The power of new experimental techniques in astronomy: Zooming in on the black hole in the Center of the Milky Way''
• Symposium 238: ``Black Holes: from Stars to Galaxies - across the Range of Masses'' will have a session on the Galactic Center
• Also, there will be a meeting of Division VII: The Galactic System that will focus on the Galactic Center and other nearby galactic nuclei.