The AAS High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) assists and promotes the advancement of research and the dissemination of knowledge about high energy events, particles, quanta, relativistic gravitational fields, and related phenomena in the astrophysical universe. HEAD also promotes the coordination of this research and knowledge with other branches of science. The division holds Division Meetings every 18 months, as well as sessions within the meetings of the American Astronomical Society. Each year, HEAD awards the Rossi Prize for recent original research in High Energy Astrophysics. At each Division Meeting, HEAD announces the Schramm Award for High Energy Astrophysics Science Journalism, the Mid-Career Prize, and the Dissertation Prize. The electronic HEAD Newsletter is published twice yearly. HEAD membership information is managed within the AAS database at AAS Member Directory.

Upcoming Meeting:

The Twenty-Second Meeting of the HEAD will be held 2025 October 12-16 at the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark, St. Louis, MO.

Recent Meetings:

The Twenty-First Divisional Meeting of the HEAD was held 2024 April 7-12, Horsehoe Bay Resort, Texas.  Horseshoe Bay is near the  center of totality for the total solar eclipse which occurs Monday April 8 from 12:16pm to 2:57pm CDT (totality from 1:34pm to 1:38pm). Please save the date, and more information about the meeting will be available late summer, 2023

The Twentieth Divisional Meeting of the HEAD was held 2023 March 26-30, at the Hilton Waikaloa Village, HI. Please see the science program for lists of talks and posters.  Pictures of the meeting, and videos of the oral talks, are available. (Please note that currently only registered meeting attendees can view the videos.)

The Nineteenth Divisional Meeting of the HEAD was held from March 13-17, 2022, at the William Penn Omni, Pittsburgh, PA.  The William Penn Omni is a grand historic hotel that first opened in 1916 and is a Pittsburgh landmark.  Videos of the oral presentations are available.  Please see the photos  from the meeting, taken by the "court photographer" Felix Fuerst.

HEAD Frontier Seminar Series:

The next Frontier Seminar is Friday, March 14th, at 1pm EST.  

Please see the HEAD Frontier Seminar Series for details on scheduled talks.

You can sign up at the  HEAD Frontier Seminar signup page to propose a future talk. Talks may be proposed at any time, and will remain in consideration for future seminars unless retracted by the speaker. Talks to be considered for the next seminar must be received by the first of the month.  

Videos of the presentations are available on the HEAD Frontier Seminar Series pages.  

The Frontier Seminars are held via Zoom.  Zoom Connection details will be sent to all HEAD members when the talks are scheduled. Contact the HEAD Secretary if you're a non-HEAD member and you'd like the Zoom meeting information.

HEADlines:  

• HEAD awards for 2025 were announced at the HEAD Business meeting at the 245th AAS meeting in National Harbor, MD. The 2025 Dissertation Prize goes to Marcus DuPont for "discovering novel explosion geometries and computing their dynamics and observational signatures as high energy astrophysical transients, using his original publicly-released heterogeneous GPU-enabled relativistic magnetohydrodynamics code ‘Simbi’". The runner ups and honorable mentions are Calvin Leung for "foundational work on interferometric techniques in the observation of fast radio bursts" and Steve Sclafani for the "first observation of neutrinos from the Milky Way". The Early Career Prize was awarded to Carolyn Kierans for "exceptional leadership as the Principal Investigator of the ComPair balloon mission, which launched in August 2023. Dr. Kierans’ work has been pivotal in pioneering new technologies for space-based gamma- ray observations." The Mid-Career Prize was awarded to Esra Bulbul for "her singular role in the success of the eROSITA Cluster and Cosmology Team results, developing the largest galaxy cluster catalog to date, and obtaining the most precise constraints on the matter distribution in our universe via the cluster mass function". The Innovation Prize was awarded to The Swift Science Operations Team for "the development of novel operations procedures for the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, enabling new scientific opportunities for the high-energy community in time-domain and multi-messenger astronomy". The Distinguished Career Prize was awarded to Dan McCammon for "his pioneering work on the development of microcalorimeters that has led to breakthroughs in X-ray astronomy and on soft diffuse X-ray background". The Bruno Rossi Prize was awarded to Maura Ann McLaughlin, Xavier Siemens, and the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves for "finding evidence of the stochastic gravitational wave background, the first direct indication of the existence of binary supermassive black holes." Please see the associated press release for the awards.

• The results of the 2024 HEAD election are in!  Elizabeth Ferrara will be continuing as Treasurer, Renee Ludlam has been elected as Secretary, and Krista Smith and Michela Negro have been elected as members on the Executive Committee.  Our thanks to Bret Lehmer, Marina Orio, and Breanna Binder for their willingness to stand for election and to serve our community, and our thanks to Tamara Bogdanovic and Tea Temim who are completing their term as members of the Executive Committee. Lastly, many thanks to Michael Corcoran for serving the community for three terms (nearly a decade) as Secretary.

• Congratulations to HEAD members Caroline Kilbourne and F. Scott Porter selected as joint recipients of the 2024 John C. Lindsay Memorial Award for Space Science, for developing and implementing pioneering low-temperature sensor technology enabling revolutionary modern astrophysical X-ray spectroscopy.  

• Older Items

Have a picture relevant to high-energy astrophysics you'd like to see on the HEAD page? Contact the webmaster to submit with an image and short description.