HEADNEWS: THE ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER OF THE
HIGH ENERGY ASTROPHYSICS DIVISION OF THE AAS
|
Newsletter No. 90, May 2007 |
- Notes from the Editor
- Christine Jones
- The View from the HEAD
Chair
- Steve Murray
- News from NASA
Headquarters -
Rick Harnden and Lou Kaluzienski
- 2007 Bruno Rossi Prize Winners - Ilana
Harrus (HEAD Press Officer)
- HEAD in the News -
Ilana Harrus and Megan Watzke
- Chandra X-ray
Observatory Operations Report - Roger Brissenden, Nancy Evans and Martin
Weisskopf
- XMM-Newton Mission
News - Randall Smith and Phil Plait
- INTEGRAL Mission News
- Christoph Winkler
- RHESSI Mission News -
David Smith
- Swift Mission News -
Padi Boyd, Lynn Cominsky, Neil Gehrels & Phil Plait
- RXTE News - Padi
Boyd, Keith Jahoda, Gail Rohrbach, Evan Smith,
Jean Swank, Craig Markwardt, Tod Strohmayer
- Suzaku Mission News
- Koji Mukai and Ilana Harrus
- GLAST Mission News -
Steven Ritz, Lynn Cominsky, and Robert Naeye
- Constellation-X News
-- Jay Bookbinder
- LISA News -- Tom Prince and Bonny Schumaker
- Meetings
- Obituaries for Kenneth Greisen, Herb Gursky and
Bohdan Paczynski
Announcements
from the Editor - Christine Jones, HEAD Secretary-Treasurer,
headsec@cfa.harvard.edu, 617-495-7137
HEAD only delivers the table-of-contents for HEADNEWS and notes
from the Editor into your mailbox.
The newsletter itself can be found online at
http://www.aas.org/head/headnews/headnews.may07.html.
The next HEAD Division meeting will be held in Los Angelos from
March 31-April 3, 2008 at the Omni Hotel. Once again John Vallerga and
the Eureka Scientific team will be
organizing the meeting. Please mark your calendars!
Plans are being made for two special HEAD sessions at the January 2008 AAS
meeting. One will likely be on AGN outbursts and the second on
very high energy cosmic rays.
Congratulations to Neil Gehrels and the
team of scientists working on NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer
mission who received this year's Rossi Prize.
And although I will send you all a reminder, it's not too soon to start
thinking about making nominations for the 2008 HEAD Rossi Prize.
Finally we note with sadness the recent passing of three outstanding
scientists and past members of HEAD -- Kenneth Greisen, Herb Gursky
and Bohdan Paczynski. They each contributed very significantly to
advances in high energy astrophysics.
Back to Top
2. The View from the HEAD Chair - Stephen Murray
Not yet available.
Back to Top
3. News from NASA Headquarters
- Rick Harnden and Lou Kaluzienski
Personnel/Organizational changes
The most noteworthy news concerns the sweeping personnel changes that
have taken place recently within the Science Mission Directorate. As
most of you are aware, Dr. Alan Stern was appointed Associate
Administrator for SMD effective 2 April 2007. Alan has a broad
background in space science, with experience both in astrophysics and
planetary science. He comes to SMD from Southwest Research
Institute's Space Science and Engineering Division in Boulder,
Colorado, where he was executive director of the Space Science and
Engineering Division. Alan has a long association with NASA, serving
on the NASA Advisory Council and as the principal investigator on a
number of planetary and lunar missions, including the New Horizons
Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission (for which he will continue as "government
PI" while serving as AA). Dr. Colleen Hartmann, the acting AA for SMD
prior to Stern's appointment, has resumed her position as Deputy
AA. Upon his arrival, Alan announced several new appointments,
including creation of the new Office of the Chief Scientist, to be
headed by Dr. John Mather of GSFC. John will continue in his role as
Project Scientist for JWST in addition to carrying out his new
responsibilities as SMD Chief Scientist. Dr. Andrew Cheng of JHU was
named Deputy Chief Scientist for Space Science (and Dr. Randall Friedl
of JPL has also been appointed deputy for Earth Science). The Chief
Scientist's Office will provide advice to Alan on issues of science
priorities within SMD. In conjunction with these new appointments,
Paul Hertz has been chosen to direct the newly created Science Policy,
Process and Ethics Office. Paul will continue in his role of ensuring
that NASA's science research programs are conducted with the highest
standards and effectiveness in accordance with NASA's principles of
science merit, open competition and peer review. He also will be
responsible for the solicitation, selection and award processes within
the directorate's research program. In addition to the above
appointments, Dr. Yvonne Pendleton of ARC has been named Senior
Advisor for Research and Analysis and Todd May from MSFC will serve as
Deputy AA for Programs. Yvonne comes to SMD from ARC where she served
as Chief of the Space Science and Astrobiology Division; Todd most
recently served as Deputy Manager of the Science and Mission Systems
Office (S&MS) at MSFC.
Concurrent with the SMD front office developments, Dr. Jon Morse has
been named Director of the Astrophysics Division. Jon comes to the
Division from GSFC, where he was a Senior Astrophysicist in the
Laboratory for Observational Cosmology. During the past year he
served on a detail from NASA to OSTP where he had been serving aswas a
Senior Policy Analyst in the Science Physical Sciences and Engineering
Division for the past yearDivision. Prior to that positionarriving at
NASA in August 2005, he was an astrophysicist in the Laboratory for
Observational Cosmology at GSFC, and before that, whileAssociate
Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Arizona State
University, he was PI of the DESTINY JDEM concept study. Previous to
his move to ASU, Jon served as Project Scientist on the HST Cosmic
Origins Spectrograph instrument while at the University of Colorado
Center for Astrophysics and Space Science.
Rick Howard, who served as Acting Division Director since February
2006, has resumed his position as Deputy Division Director, and will
continue his focus on issues associated with the Astrophysics flight
program.
SMD Zero-Base Review
High among the priorities announced by Alan Stern is his desire to
revitalize the SMD Research and Analysis program, with special
emphasis upon on strengthening of the suborbital program and its role
in the training of future space science PI's. Accordingly, as he
mentioned in recent Congressional testimony, the AA has initiated a
"Zero-Base Review" of all SMD portfolios to ensure that allocated
funding appropriately recognizes scientific and programmatic
priorities, with the goal of maximizing the return from the SMD
budget.
4. 2007 Bruno Rossi Prize
- Ilana Harrus, HEAD Press Officer
This year's Bruno Rossi Prize was awarded to Neil Gehrels and the
team of scientists working on NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer
mission.
Swift, which launched on November 20, 2004, was designed to rapidly
detect, locate, and observe gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), powerful cosmic
explosions which astronomers think are the birth cries of black
holes. GRBs were first observed in the 1960s, and were a complete
mystery until the mid 1990s. To date, Swift has detected over 200
GRBs, and its rapid response - it was named after the bird, which
catches its prey "on the fly" - has been critical to understanding
these titanic events.
"This is a great recognition of all the wonderful science coming from
Swift and the years of hard work that the team has done to make it
possible," said Neil Gehrels, the Principal Investigator for the
Swift mission. "Swift is a remarkable machine which is still going
strong. We expect even more great things from it over the coming
years."
Among Swift's notable observations have been:
1) The first detection of an afterglow (the lingering, fading glow)
of a short burst, GRB050509, thought to be caused by the collision of
two ultradense neutron stars.
2) The detection of the most distant GRB ever seen (GRB 050904),
lying at a distance of 13 billion light years from the Earth.
3) The discovery of the nearby GRB 060218 that was coincident with a
supernova explosion (SN 2006aj)
4) X-ray observations of NASA's Deep Impact probe when it smashed
into comet 9/P Tempel 1 in July 2005, helping solar system scientists
determine how much debris was ejected by the impact.
5) Highly-detailed data of a powerful flare from a nearby magnetar, a
tremendously magnetic neutron star, which was so bright it saturated
Swift's detectors and actually physically impacted the Earth's
magnetic field in December 2004.
Besides observing GRBs, Swift has several others scientific goals,
including observing supernovae (powerful stellar explosions which can
be used to map out the shape and fate of the Universe) and making the
first high-energy survey of the entire sky since the 1980s.
5. HEAD in the News
- Ilana Harrus, HEAD Press Officer and Megan Watzke, Chandra Press Officer
Since November, High Energy Astrophysics missions has produced
results that were at the forefront of the news. Starting in
Mid-November, we note:
INTEGRAL spotted a rare kind of gamma-ray outburst. The vast
explosion of energy allowed astronomers to pinpoint a possible new
black hole in our Galaxy. The outburst was also observed by
XMM-Newton, Chandra, SUZAKU and SWIFT. The result received coverage
by space.com, MSNBC, and other websites.
SWIFT keeps exploring weird explosions in the Universe. In December
2005, SWIFT detected a superflare from II Peg. The result, announced
in November to the press, was covered by the BBC, Washington Post,
Discovery Channel, New Scientist, and Nobel Intent among several
others more traditional outlets.
Another result covered by the press in November was the detection of
two supernovae in NGC 1316 by Swift. Such double event is rare and the
announcement was covered by Discovery, New Scientist, Science Daily,
United Press International, The BBC, Scientific American, Science
News, and made it around the world with coverage Der Spiegel in
Germany and People's Daily in China.
Then, in December, SWIFT scientists announced a newly recognized type
of cosmic explosion called a hybrid gamma-ray burst. As with other
gamma-ray bursts, this hybrid blast is likely signaling the birth of a
new black hole.
The result was covered by MSNBC, National Geographic, New Scientist,
Scientific American, and "In the news" in England.
Chandra keeps making the news. As 2006 came to a close, the news of
dark matter in the "Bullet Cluster" continued to reverberate, making
several "top stories of the year" lists. Among them were Discover
Magazine (image was on the cover), New Scientist, and USA Today.
In November, a Chandra result on Cas A was covered by InTheNews.co.uk
(UK), Trend Information (Azerbaijan), Space Ref, PressZoom,
PhysOrg.com, SpiritIndia (India), MSNBC, Space.com, HappyNews.com,
Spaceflight Now, innovations report (Germany), International Reporter
(India), Malaysia Sun, Monsters and Critics.com (UK), United Press
International, Science Magazine, and Sky & Telescope.
In early January, Chandra was the center of two Press releases, one on
DEM L238 and DEM L249 and the other on the black hole at the center of
the Milky Way. These were covered by News24 (South Africa), New
Scientist, Science NOW, Zee News (India), innovations report,
SpiritIndia, Space Daily, PhysOrg.com, SpaceRef, Agence France Presse,
InTheNews.co.uk, Space.com, CCN Magazine (Canada), Cosmos (Australia),
Spaceflight Now, DailyIndia.com, SpaceRef, Herald Sun (Australia),
United Press International, Sky & Telescope, and Astronomy Magazine.
In March, a combined result from Spitzer, Chandra and ground based
telescopes revealed a panorama of more than a 1000 black holes. This
result was covered by Space.com, PhysOrg.com, People's Daily Online
(China), USA Today.com, NewsMax.com, innovations report, CCN Magazine,
Space Daily, Discovery Reports Canada, DailyIndia, National
Geographic.com, Science Daily, Xinhua General News, The Ottawa Sun,
The Toronto Sun, London Free Press, and Calgary Sun.
The most recent result (on the discovery of the brightest supernova
seen) was the subject of a press media advisory on May 7 and the press
coverage will be reported in the next issue of the HEAD newsletter.
Chandra also received attention for items that were not found from one
of our releases. These 'bonus' stories included an article on
analyzing Chandra data at home as part of a larger story of online
astronomy. The story got picked up in dozens of media outlets.
Likewise, a story out of the AAS about a new star in the Southern
Cross was very popular in Australia, New Zealand and other countries
where that constellation is featured on their flag. About a month
later, the New York Times ran a story on the same result. A feature
story on black holes in the Washington Post (written by Marc Kauffman)
named Chandra's contributions to the field.
Below is the full list of press releases, related to HEAD that were
issued since the last newsletter.
May 7, 2007:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/07_releases/press_050707.html
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/05/07_supernova.shtml
May 3, 2007:
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2007/pr200712.html
May 1, 2007:
http://www.galex.caltech.edu/MEDIA/
April 20, 2007:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMDV2MJC0F_index_0.html;
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2007/pr200709.html
April 12, 2007:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/07_releases/press_041207.html
April 11, 2007:
http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/2007/07-12.html
April 10, 2007:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/mystery_spiralarms.html
April 4. 2007:
http://mr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12966.html
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/supernova_imposter.html
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/04/04_supernova.shtml
March 19, 2007:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/stories/cosmicrays.html
March 15, 2007:
http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/LT_grb.asp
March 12, 2007:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/07_releases/press_031207.html
March 09, 2007:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/07_releases/press_031207.html
March 08, 2007:
http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Grupe3-2007.htm
February 23, 2007:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMPE0CE8YE_index_0.html
February 22, 2007:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM01WBE8YE_index_0.html
February 16, 2007:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMPYIO2UXE_index_0.html
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMPADBE8YE_index_0.html
February 08, 2007:
http://www.ras.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1146&Itemid=2
February 05, 2007:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/relic_wind.html
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/gas_cocoon.html
Januray 18, 2007:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Integral/SEMGOVRMTWE_0.html
January 16, 2007:
http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1024862
http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/news/2007/rossi.html
January 10, 2007:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/07_releases/press_011007.html
January 4, 2007:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/07_releases/press_010407.html
January 03, 2007:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/07_releases/press_010307.html
December 21, 2006:
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/12/20_bursts.shtml
http://mr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12936.html
http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2006/pr-49-06.html
http://www.nbi.ku.dk/english/side94031.htm?foredragid=4898&lang=da
December 20, 2006:
http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/news/2006/06-373.html
December 07, 2006:
http://www.soton.ac.uk/mediacentre/news/2006/dec/13_/06.shtml
December 05, 2006:
http://www.galex.caltech.edu/MEDIA/
November 27, 2006:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM8SDANMUE_index_0.html
http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/LS5039.asp
November 20, 2006:
http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Swift11-2006.htm
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2006/pr200630.html
November 15, 2006:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/06_releases/press_111506.html
For the full list of Chandra image releases from this period, see:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/chronological.html
6. Chandra X-ray Observatory Operations Report--
Roger Brissenden and Nancy Evans, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
and Martin Weisskopf, Marshall Space Flight Center
We are pleased to report that the Chandra spacecraft and science
instruments have continued to operate in an excellent manner during
the last 6 months. There were no major anomalies or safemodes during
the period, and operations were routine.
The average observing efficiency for November through March was 62%
(compared with an average maximum of ~70%), down from 67% during the
prior 6 months. The decrease in the average was due primarily to three
back-to-back high-radiation solar events in December that reduced the
efficiency in that month to a meager 49%. The efficiency has been
approximately 68% since then.
The Aspect Camera CCD has continued to accumulate warm pixels at the
expected rate. A decision was made to reduce the temperature of the
aspect camera CCD by 4 degrees C to offset the gradual increase. The
lower temperature has improved image centroiding and star acquisition
success, and has reduced the risk of stars being dropped due to nearby
warm pixels.
Both the ACIS and HRC focal plane instruments have continued to
operate well.
The Charge Transfer Inefficiency (CTI) of the ACIS CCDs continues to
increase at an acceptable rate: 3.2*10^-6 (2.3%) per year for the
front-illuminated devices and 1.0*10^-6 (5.9%) per year for the
back-illuminated. Monitoring of contamination buildup on the ACIS
Optical Blocking Filer shows that the transmission at 0.7 keV may have
decreased by slightly more than the current model indicates. An
investigation is underway to determine if this is a real effect or the
result of a bias in the data analysis as the flux from the radioactive
calibration source continues to decrease over the mission. No actions
are required in response to these trends.
The processing, archiving and distribution of Chandra data has
continued smoothly, with the average time from target observation to
data distribution remaining at approximately one day. The archive has
grown more rapidly over the past year due to the third full
reprocessing of Chandra data that is currently underway. The
reprocessing is proceeding well and is now approximately 85% complete,
with completion expected in summer 2007. The primary archive is now
4.4 TB in size, and data retrievals are on the order of 450 GB per
month.
The Chandra Press Office continues to regularly produce press and
image releases on the latest newsworthy results from the mission.
(For more details, see the "Chandra in the News" section of the
newsletter.) As a new avenue to share Chandra and its science with the
public, the EPO group now creates a monthly video podcast. These
segments, lasting between three and five minutes, introduce a topic in
X-ray astronomy in a colloquial, but scientifically accurate, way. In
addition to being included on many of the top science podcast lists,
the Chandra podcasts were selected as the winner of the 2007 Pirelli
INTERNETional Award for Science Communication of Physics. The Pirelli
awards have been given since 1996, making them the first international
internet multimedia award aimed at the diffusion of scientific and
technological culture worldwide.
The Cycle 9 proposal deadline passed on March 15 with 664 proposals
submitted. The peer review is scheduled to be held in Boston June
22-24 and promises to yield an exciting 9th year of Chandra science.
The 10th Chandra Fellows review was held in January, with five
outstanding new Fellows selected from a record field.
We received 10 White Papers in support of possible Chandra Extremely
Long Projects (ELPs). These were evaluated by a small review team
including the CXC Director and the NASA Project Scientist. It was
found that most if not all of the proposed science described in the
White Papers could be accomplished within the current Chandra proposal
framework utilizing the category of Very Large Proposals (VLPs), for
which individual proposals can range from 1-3Ms. Thus, there is no
plan to implement ELPs at this time. The CXC will take a few specific
steps to encourage members of the community to consider submitting
proposals for the full 3 Ms currently available under VLPs when they
believe the science objectives require and merit this amount of
observing time. Guidelines for the Peer Review panels will be
reviewed, to ensure that the panels give serious consideration to
proposals requesting times up to the 3Ms limit of the VLP category.
We look forward to celebrating the completion of Chandra's 8th year of
science operations on July 23, and joining with the community at the
symposium
Eight Years of Science with Chandra, 23 - 25 October 2007, in
Huntsville, Alabama.
The Chandra Postdoctoral Fellowship Program -- Nancy Remage Evans --
-- (CfA)
This year we had a record number of 104 applications for Chandra
Postdoctoral Fellowships. The list new Fellows is provided below.
Name PhD Institution Host Institution
John Fregeau MIT Northwestern (yr 1)/KITP-UCSB (yrs 2 &3)
Jonathan McKinney U. Illinois Stanford
Ian Parrish Princeton Berkeley
Jesper Rasmussen U. Copenhagen Carnegie Obs.
Jeremy Schnittman MIT Johns Hopkins
Keep an eye on our web pages for information about the Chandra Fellows
Symposium (Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007 , at the Center for Astrophysics,
Cambridge, MA), and the annual Fellowship competition (November,
2007). The Chandra Fellows Symposium is open to all, and we encourage you to
drop by to hear some exciting new X-ray results.
http://cxc.harvard.edu/fellows/
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7. XMM-Newton Mission News - Randall Smith (NASA/GSFC) and
Lynn Cominsky (Sonoma State)
The US XMM-Newton Guest Observer Facility (GOF) hosted the 2007 XMM
Users' Group Meeting on April 30, 2007, where reports on mission
status, recent calibration and software improvements, and future plans
were discussed. As reported at this meeting, all XMM-Newton
instruments are in good health, with no significant changes in the
past year. The international XMM-Newton meeting will be held in early
June; HEAD members should contact the XMM GOF if they wish to have an
issue raised at this meeting.
We are also preparing for the 2008 NASA Senior Review, which will
examine XMM-Newton's successes in the past two years and consider
continued funding through 2012. We invite users to alert the XMM GOF
to significant science results obtained with XMM-Newton to include in
the next report to the Senior Review. The scientific report to the
2006 Senior Review is available at
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/FTP/xmm/doc/SR2006.pdf.
Recent notable accomplishments include:
(1) The release of version 7.0 of the Science Analysis System (SAS) in
June 2006, incorporating many enhancements; see
http://xmm.vilspa.esa.es/sas/ for more details. The next release
(v7.1) will occur in Summer of 2007. The XMM archive has been
reprocessed as well, and this data will be available for download from
the XMM-Newton Science Archive
(
http://xmm.esac.esa.int/external/xmm_data_acc/xsa/index.shtml)
shortly.
(2) The initial version of the 2nd XMM Serendipitous EPIC source
catalogue is now complete and available at
http://xmmssc-www.star.le.ac.uk/newpages/xcat_public_2xmmp.html. The
new catalogue contains 123,170 unique sources from 2400 XMM-Newton
EPIC observations with a median 0.2-12 keV flux of 2.4e-14 erg/cm^2/s;
~20% have fluxes below 1e-14 erg/cm^2/s. All of the data are
available in either FITS or comma-separated text format.
(3) The US XMM GOF has also reprocessed all data from Optical Monitor
observations, which is now available through MAST (
http://archive.stsci.edu/xmm-om/)
This catalogue includes source lists
and images in several different filters, all produced using SAS v7.0.
The source detection, photometry are done automatically, with
astrometry matched against the standard Guide Star Catalogue.
(4) The US XMM GOF will have a new release of software to model the
EPIC MOS particle background, which will be available at
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xmm/xmmhp_xmmesas.html.
This software
models the quiescent particle background both spectrally and spatially
for the EPIC MOS detectors, and produces output that can be used in
standard tools such as XSPEC and ds9.
We would also like to alert XMM observers to two facilities that ease
data processing and analysis difficulties. Users who do not wish to
install SAS can now use the online XMM-Newton Science Archive to
automatically reprocess observations to use the latest calibration;
see the documentation for assistance. In addition, the US XMM GOF and
the HEASARC have released an update to Hera (
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/hera/ ) which will generate EPIC
responses (both arfs and rmfs) on demand. This is particularly useful
since it allows X-ray spectral analysis to be done without downloading
and installing the entire SAS and CCF repositories. More SAS tools
could be added to Hera based on user interest; please email the Hera
or XMM GOF helpdesk with suggestions or questions.
The anticipated release date for the next call for XMM-Newton
proposals (AO7) is August 20th, 2007 with a due date of October 5th,
2007 (12:00UT). For more information about XMM-Newton, please visit
the US Guest Observer Facility pages at
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xmm/xmmgof.html
For more information about XMM-Newton, please visit the US Guest
Observer Facility pages at
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xmm/xmmgof.html
XMM-Newton E/PO News:
Two products were submitted to NASA Product Review, and both were
approved: the Magnetic Globe Lithograph
(
http://xmm.sonoma.edu/edu/supernova/Eglobeactilitho.pdf)
And the CLEA lab, Dying Stars and the Birth of the Elements (download
from:
http://xmm.sonoma.edu/edu/clea/index.html ).
Progress continues on the Night Sky Network "Extreme Universe" toolkit
for amateur astronomers, with the message and themes now
approved. This
toolkit should be available in 2008.
A beta-version of the eXtreme Universe portable planetarium show is
now
available for testing; contact Lynn Cominsky at
lynnc@universe.sonoma.edu for more information. It uses Stellarium
0.8.1, which is open-source software, and can be displayed on computer
screens as well as inside portable planetarium domes. This work was
featured in a poster presentation at the winter AAS meeting in
Seattle.
During 2006, XMM-Newton Educator Ambassadors trained approximately 300
teachers in 10 different workshops.
Back to Top
8. INTEGRAL News - Christoph Winkler
While INTEGRAL is continuing to operate smoothly, the ISOC staff has
been busy first with the special AO for Key Programmes and then with
the
preparation of AO-5 itself. In addition, a lot of work was done on the
Archive at ISOC including the new INVITE tool for data visualization.
INTEGRAL's fifth 12-month observation cycle starting on August 17,
2007,
will be unique in that 6 Ms of the total science time are dedicated to
Key Programmes. The idea of a Key Programme (KP), a single or set of
observations whose scientific aims require long exposures, was
introduced in AO-4. The KP on the Galactic Centre region was warmly
accepted by the community and successfully carried out.
The only notable recent operational event has been the 9th SPI
annealing period (in order to maintain SPI's high spectral
resolution), which started on 2006 Dec 4 (revolution 506) and ended
just before Christmas, December 22 (revolution 511). The energy
resolution at 882.5 keV was 2.62 keV before annealing and 2.40 keV
just after the annealing.
Integral Science Highlights
LS 5039 is the only X-ray binary/micro-quasar persistently detected at
TeV energies by the Cherenkov HESS telescope. It is moreover a
gamma-ray emitter in the GeV and possibly MeV energy ranges. LS 5039
has been detected along almost all the electromagnetic spectrum thanks
to several radio, infrared, optical and soft X-ray
detections. However, hard X-ray detections above 20 keV have been so
far elusive and/or doubtful, partly due to source confusion for the
poor spatial resolution of hard X-ray instruments. Thanks to its
imaging abilities, INTEGRAL detected LS 5039 at hard X-ray fluxes
which are significantly lower than previous estimates obtained with
BATSE in the same energy range but, in the lower interval, agree with
extrapolation of previous RXTE measurements (P. Goldoni et al,
astroph/ 0609708).
A rare X-ray nova (IGR J17497-2821) was detected on 16 September 2006
during KP observations of the Galactic Centre region. Follow-up
observations identified the source/companion at X-rays (XMM, Swift)
and optical ("Euler" telescope/Chile). A "canonical" black-hole
light-curve was observed and the combined INTEGRAL/Swift spectrum
features a hard cut-off power law continuum spectrum. The outburst in
a low hard state can be explained by accretion through the hot corona
of the accretion disc. Further observations of the companion at low
energies should reveal more information on the BH mass (R. Walter et
al., A&A, 461, L17, 2007; Rodriguez et al., A&A 655, L97, 2007; Paizis
et al., A&A 657, L109, 2007).
Further detailed analysis of the transient X-ray pulsar V0332+53
observed by INTEGRAL and RXTE during a powerful outburst in 2004/2005
showed that the cyclotron line energy (at about 26 keV) decreases
nearly linearly with increasing source luminosity.
A. Bird et al. have published the 3rd IBIS soft gamma-ray source
catalogue (ApJS 2007, in press). The scientific dataset is based on
more than 40 Ms of high quality observations performed during the
first three and a half years of Core Program and public IBIS/ISGRI
observations. Compared to previous IBIS/ISGRI surveys, this catalogue
includes a substantially increased coverage of extragalactic fields,
and comprises more than 400 high-energy sources detected in the energy
range 17-100 keV, including both transients and faint persistent
objects which can only be revealed with longer exposure times.
Usually, normal operations are interrupted by unexpected events in the
X-ray/gamma-ray sky. However, the last part of 2006 was unexpectedly
quiet. This changed near the end of December when the black-hole
candidate binary GX 339-4 was found to be in a hard X-ray outburst by
Swift/BAT. As soon as the source became visible by INTEGRAL it had
continued to brighten, and it triggered INTEGRAL TOO observations.
The INTEGRAL data of this TOO program is made publicly available, as
soon as possible after the observations have been performed. They can
be retrieved via anonymous ftp from:
ftp://isdcarc.unige.ch/arc/FTP/arc_distr/GX339-4/
In the beginning of February a large X-ray burst from the anomalous
X-ray pulsar 4U 0142+61 was found. This triggered TOO observations on
INTEGRAL which were implemented in a record time in revolution 528. In
the meantime, the high-mass X-ray binary IGRJ 11215-5952, had become
active and also triggered TOO observations, which were done a
revolution later, i.e. in revolution 529.
For more INTEGRAL news, please see the INTEGRAL Newsletters at
http://integral.esac.esa.int//newsletters/
Back to Top
9. RHESSI Mission News - David M. Smith, U. C. Santa Cruz
The Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) has
passed its fifth anniversary somewhat battered by radiation damage but
still going strong. A few surprisingly large solar flares have been
popping up even as we settle into the solar minimum. RHESSI
observations were made of these flares, including gamma-ray lines,
using the three of RHESSI's nine detectors that are still free enough
of radiation damage to see them. A brief discussion of this late
extension of the solar cycle and the RHESSI instrument status are
presented in a RHESSI science "nugget" by Pascal Saint-Hilaire and
Gerald Share at
http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~tohban/nuggets/?page=article&article_id=45/.
We recommend all the short articles at this site for anyone interested
in a longer, but entertaining and accessible, summary of RHESSI's
activities.
Notice in particular nugget #41, by Sm Krucker and Gordon Hurford of
U. C. Berkeley, showing one of the most surprising recent discoveries
by RHESSI: gamma-rays > 250 keV seen up in the solar corona during
large flares, rather than down in the photosphere at the footpoints
where they are thought to belong. The matter for high-energy
electrons to interact with is so sparse in the corona that they must
be stably trapped there for a minute or more to produce this emission.
For those with more exotic tastes, nugget #50 by Hugh Hudson describes
the search for evidence of axions, a dark-matter candidate, from the
Sun by Iain Hannah and collaborators (Hannah et al. 2007, ApJ 659,
L77). The hypothetical signal would emerge when photons convert to
axions via interactions with the magnetic field in the Sun's core,
escape the Sun, then reconvert to x rays in the magnetic field of the
corona. The result would be an image of the solar core in soft x-rays
apparently "shining through" to the outside.
RHESSI also continues to be able to receive transient signals from any
direction, although the sensitivity is reduced significantly by
radiation damage. Cosmic gamma-ray bursts (see the November 2006 HEAD
newsletter) and terrestrial gamma-ray flashes continue to be collected
and studied. The very bright but slow classical nova V1280 Sco
earlier this year provided a target for RHESSI's capability to search
for the positron-annihilation flash which may be among the earliest
signals from a nova. The analysis, by Tristan Matthews of U. C. Santa
Cruz, so far shows no detectable signal.
By the November 2007 newsletter, we hope to be able to report
on a newly youthful RHESSI, reinvigorated by a planned annealing
of its detectors to remove radiation damage. In principle this
could return it to its full sensitivity for gamma-ray lines.
Back to Top
10. Swift Mission News - Padi Boyd and Neil Gehrels (GSFC),
Lynn Cominsky (Sonoma State) and Robert Naeye (SP Systems/GSFC)
The Swift team heard great news at the January AAS meeting in
Seattle. At the HEAD business meeting, Steve Murray announced that the
2007 Rossi Prize has been awarded to Principal Investigator Neil
Gehrels and the entire Swift team for their gamma-ray burst
discoveries. The citation specifically noted the mission's
breakthroughs in helping scientists understand short bursts and GRB
afterglows in general.
As of mid-April 2007, Swift continued to operate in good health. The
mission had observed 219 GRBs, including 19 short GRBs. Swift has also
performed 273 rapid-reaction slews for non-GRB targets of opportunity
(TOOs). The TOO request rate has greatly increased in the past six
months as more scientists learn about Swift's multi-wavelength
capabilities.
Swift has had several recent science highlights. The satellite
observed the X-ray afterglow of GRB 060729 for more than 100 days
after the burst. Dirk Grupe (Penn State) and his colleagues found that
the light curve decays as a power law, with no evidence for a jet
break. This result implies either that the jet has an opening angle
greater than 25 degrees, or that some unknown process in the GRB
outflow (beyond the standard fireball model) is masking the jet
break. The typical opening angle of long GRBs is thought to be about 5
degrees.
GRB 070110 also exhibited an unusual X-ray afterglow. The afterglow
remained nearly constant in brightness for five hours, then faded
rapidly more than tenfold. Eleonora Troja (INAF-IASF of Palermo,
Italy) and her colleagues propose that these observations are best
explained by a stellar core collapse that produced a magnetar rather
than a black hole.
Besides studying GRBs, Swift made important contributions to
observations of SN 2006jc, whose progenitor unleashed a major
Luminous-Blue-Variable-like outburst just two years before the
supernova itself. Swift observations allowed Stefan Immler (GSFC) and
his colleagues to measure the mass ejected in the outburst: about 0.01
solar mass. As part of an ongoing survey, Swift has observed 41
supernovae simultaneously in optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray
wavelengths.
Hans Krimm (USRA/GSFC) has set up a BAT Hard X-ray Transient Monitor
web page, where people can check on the latest transient X-ray
sources. The page can be found at
http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/results/transients/
.
Conferences
An entire day of a conference on SN 1987A was devoted to Swift. A
second day of that conference, which was held February 19-23 in Aspen,
Colorado, was for papers on GRBs.
An entire conference devoted to Swift was held May 1-2 at Penn State
University. Participants in this "What Next for Swift Workshop"
discussed the types of contributions that Swift can make to
astrophysics over the next few years in addition to continued GRB
observations.
Guest Investigator Program Update
Swift Guest Investigator Cycle 3 began April 1, 2007. This year, in
addition to funding for GRB theory, multiwavelength follow-up, and new
Swift projects, a limited amount of Swift observing time was made
available for non-GRB TOOs. The list of approved TOO targets can be
found on the Swift website at
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/proposals/c3_acceptarg.html
Abstracts of all accepted Swift Cycle 3 programs are available through
the NSPIRES site at
http://nspires.nasaprs.com/ under the link
"Selected Proposals."
For Cycle 4, a limited number of non-transient monitoring programs
will also be included in the Guest Investigator program. Details of
the Cycle 4 call for proposals can be found at the NSPIRES website
under the "Solicitations" link. Swift Cycle 4 is Appendix D.7 of
NASA's Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES)
2007. The schedule for Swift Cycle 4 is:
* ROSES 2007 NRA Released: February 16, 2007
* Notices of Intent due: September 14, 2007
* Proposals due: November 9, 2007
* Proposal Review: January 2008
More information can be found at
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/proposals/
Swift Software and Pipeline Update
We expect a new release of the Swift data analysis software in
mid-summer 2007, as part of the HEASoft package. The most recent
version of the software can be downloaded from
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/lheasoft/.
The current version of the Swift software is 2.6, which was released
in December 2006. The Swift Data Center processing and analysis
pipeline was updated to run with the current version of the Swift
software in February 2007. All Swift users should update their
software to the latest released version so they are using the latest
tools in their analysis.
The BAT and UVOT software users guides were updated to align with this
release. They may be downloaded from
http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/analysis/
Swift E/PO and Public Affairs News:
The Swift E/PO team reports that a new set of four Newton's Law
posters is available for download from
http://swift.sonoma.edu/education/index.html.
Each poster features beautiful and topic-appropriate artwork by Sonoma
State University artist Aurore Simonnet. On the back side of each
poster is a description of Newton's Law that explains how the
illustrations on the front of the poster relate to this Law, an
example of the Law using the Swift spacecraft itself, and an activity
that will give students hands-on experience with the Law. Hard copies
should be available by the end of 2007.
Swift now has a MySpace site and blog, which includes mission news and
images:
http://myspace.com/swiftsatellite.
You can order custom Swift logo products such as shirts, hats, bags,
and even U.S. postage stamps at
http://www.cafepress.com/swiftsatellite.
Our first Swift podcast featuring an interview of Neil Gehrels is now
online at
http://swift.sonoma.edu/resources/multimedia/audio/index.html.
The latest edition of the Swift newsletter (issue 7) is now online at
http://swift.sonoma.edu/resources/multimedia/newsletter/issue_7/index.html.
Goddard's new senior science writer for the Astrophysics Science
Division, Robert Naeye, wrote a press release about GRBs 060729 and
070110, and a press release about SN 2006jc.
Back to Top
11. RXTE News - Padi Boyd, Keith Jahoda, Craig Markwardt,
Gail Rohrbach, Evan Smith, Tod Strohmayer, and Jean Swank - GSFC
RXTE contribution to the HEAD Newsletter, 5/01/07. With
contributions from Padi Boyd, Keith Jahoda, Craig Markwardt, Gail
Rohrbach, Evan Smith, Tod Strohmayer, and Jean Swank.
The Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has now passed its first
decade in orbit, it continues to serve the astrophysics community, and
to produce important scientific results. Some of the most recent
results, from Cycle 11, are highlighted below.
The Cycle 12 proposal review was conducted from 2007 April 10 - 11, in
Baltimore, MD. The results of the review are now public and can be
found at
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xte/timeline/cycle12_targets.html.
A total of 103 proposals were approved for observations, totaling 40
Msec of observing time. Of the accepted proposals, just over half are
for targets of opportunity (TOOs).
The Cycle will officially begin on June 29, 2007. Proposals for
observing time were selected which could be completed in the 18 months
through December 25, 2008. A high proportion, about a third of the
good observation time, has recently been for TOOs, and the number of
such observations is not otherwise restricted. This has led to delay
in carrying out some proposals which are not time critical. Cycle 11
has been extended from March 2 to June 29, 2007 to allow an
accumulated backlog of observations to be carried out.
The 2006 senior review recommendation was for RXTE operations to
continue through February 2009. Although the Cycle is intended to end
December 25, based on past performance we likely would not be done
with the observations that the Cycle was committed to finish or with
some TOO observations of some active transient. If the 2008 Senior
Review confirms this schedule of turn off for RXTE, we will address
then what would be the most important observations to make in 2009 to
finish the mission (though this would be constrained because the
galactic center will be too close to the Sun at that time).
The accepted observing program includes continuation of scans of the
Galactic Bulge and the Galactic Center region of the Galactic
plane. These observations provide maps of these regions down to a
sensitivity of about 1 mCrab every few days, where the ASM instrument
may achieve only 30 mCrab due to source confusion, although it
observes more often (100 min). Proposals to observe transient
objects
which are millisecond pulsars, low mass X-ray binaries, magnetars,
high mass binary pulsars, and black holes were accepted. Proposals to
trigger observations of AGN when GLAST or HESS finds them bright at
higher energies were accepted. Observatories like Spitzer, LOFAR, and
ROBONET offer the potential of joint science phase space that is of
broad interest. Unprecedented monitoring of the eclipsed X-ray source
in the eta Carina sytem will continue. Discoveries of pulsations and
QPO in selected low mass X-ray binaries will be followed
up. Monitoring programs of AGN will be able to improve on low
frequency power spectral features.
During the period between the Cycle 12 review and June 29, 2007 it
will remain possible to trigger Cycle 11 TOOs, but will also be
possible to trigger a Cycle 12 TOO if it does not conflict with a
Cycle 11 proposal. Also, it may be possible to schedule Cycle 12
coordinations with other observatories during this time.
The Senior Review of 2006 did not allocate funds to a guest observer
program for Cycle 12. It will be possible, however, to submit an ADP
proposal for data analysis of RXTE observations. Details on the ADP
solicitation can be found at the NASA NSPIRES site:
http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/index.do
Science Highlights:
The only Z source transient that has been seen, XTE J1701-462 has
continued to oscillate in flux during its decay. It is being watched
for the possibility that it will go through ATOLL like behavior as it
decays and possibly even become a millisecond pulsar. However, the
source continues to oscillate around a level of 400 mCrab. Jeroen
Homan (MIT) and colleagues have compared the color - color diagrams as
it morphed from the type shown by the most luminous Z sources (Cyg
X-2, GX 5-1, GX 340+0) to the type exhibited by Sco X-1.
The Rossi Prizes for 2006 were awarded to Tod Strohmayer (NASA/GSFC),
Rudy Wijnands (University of Amsterdam), and Deepto Chakrabarty
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for their work with RXTE on
the millisecond timing properties of accreting neutron stars. All
three gave talks at the 2007 January AAS meeting in Seattle. Wijnands
focused on the discovery of the accreting millisecond pulsars and the
relation of the spin to understanding the kHz quasiperiodic
oscillations. Strohmayer discussed the relation to the spin
oscillations seen during thermonuclear bursts. Chakrabarty compared
the presently observed spin distribution to that of recycled radio
pulsars, which confirms the relation between these objects and
implies an interesting challenge to understand.
In November 2006 the black hole transient GX 339-4 became active
again, for the fourth time during RXTE's lifetime. The outburst has
been showing similar, but noticeably different progress and will add
another point to the correlation between waiting time and luminosities
at the state transitions that Wenfei Yu (Shanghai Astronomical
Observatory) and colleagues have reported for recurrent transients.
Galactic black holes exhibit strong low frequency quasi-periodic
oscillations (QPOs) in several states during outbursts. Using RXTE
observations of several confirmed black holes and black hole
candidates, Nikolai Shaposhnikov (USRA/CRESST/GSFC) and Lev Titarchuk
(NRL) measured their QPO frequency vs power-law slope correlation and
used it to measure the mass of the black hole for which a dynamical
mass is not available or has been difficult to measure. Comparison of
GRS 1915+105 and Cyg X-1 imply that the mass of the Cyg X-1 black hole
is 8.7+-0.8 solar masses, compared to the 6.9-13.2 range inferred by
Gies & Bolton (1986).
Black holes are famously said to have "no hair," meaning that they can
be described in General Relativity by only two parameters, effectively
mass and spin. Accurate masses can and have been measured for some
black holes, but the spin parameter has been a tougher nut to crack,
because its effects are largely restricted to changes in the
space-time structure very near the event horizon. RXTE's large
throughput and fast timing ability have enabled new efforts to measure
black hole spins. Recently, two independent efforts have focused on
the micro-quasar GRS 1915+105, and have attempted to use spectral
modeling of emission from the inner accretion disk to measure its
spin. Jeff McClintock (MIT) and colleagues identify and fit data
intervals in which GRS 1915+105 shows spectral behavior characteristic
of disk emission. Using fits with fully relativistic models, they
argue for a near maximal spin for GRS 1915+105. Matthew Middleton
(University of Durham, UK) and collaborators use esentially the same
technique, but have a different criteria for selecting the "disk
dominated" states. Nevertheless, they also infer a rather high spin
rate of 0.7. While each group argues that they've got it right,
perhaps more interesting is that they both require a substantial spin
rate for the black hole in GRS 1915+105.
One of RXTE's major accomplishments has been to show that the
Anomalous
X-Ray Pulsars (AXPs) as well as the Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGRs)
are "magnetars," neutron stars with super-strong magnetic fields. In
March 2007, Rim Dib (McGill University) and colleagues reported that
the AXP 1E 1048.1-5937 had a sudden spin-up together with an increase
in flux. Follow-up observations found that the source was also bright
in the infrared, suggesting that the near-IR and X-ray emission is
related. While the glitches and bursts of the AXPs appear to be rare,
RXTE monitoring programs led by Vicki Kaspi (also McGill) have now
caught
most of them exhibiting such behavior. Another recent example is the
detection with RXTE of a bright, long burst from the AXP 4U 0142+61.
The burst was followed by an extended tail of pulsed emission, lasting
almost 30 minutes (see Gavriil et al., ATel 993).
One of the more puzzling X-ray sources in the sky is Circinus X-1. It
is a putative high mass binary, although the exact nature of its
secondary remains enigmatic. It's X-ray properties are more in line
with those exhibited by accreting neutron stars in LMXBs. RXTE
observations have further lifted the shroud of mystery surrounding the
object. Stratos Boutloukos (University of Amsterdam) and colleagues
recently reported the discovery of kilohertz QPOs from the source, but
with frequencies characteristically lower than in any other neutron
star LMXB. They found the lower and upper kHz QPOs ranging between
about 56 and 225, and 230 and 500 Hz, respectively. The properties of
these QPOs match well with those of other neutron star kHz QPOs
(except for the frequency ranges), providing confirmation that Cir X-1
is indeed an accreting neutron star system. An interesting result is
that the separation in frequency between the Cir X-1 kHz QPOs
increases with frequency. This is opposite to what is generally seen
in other sources, but the authors point out that it is consistent with
some models.
Spacecraft and GOF Update
The PCA comprises 5 detectors. One of these is operating currently as
well as at launch. The other four require intermittent rest
periods. On Dec 25, 2006, a second of these four lost its propane
layer. In both cases the xenon layers continue to operate well, with
background about twice as high as for the detectors protected by the
front propane layer. Background under the new conditions is being
accumulated
and testing of a response matrix appropriate for the changed
conditions is in progress. In both cases the loss of pressure from the
propane layers was consistent with effusion from a hole tens of
microns in diameter. In neither case were the detectors looking in
the direction of the satellite motion. If micrometeorites are
responsible, the observed rate of collisions is about 1 in 5
years. Models
of orbital debris available from Johnson Space Flight Center would
predict a rate on this order, although a detailed comparison has not
been made.
The RXTE Web pages now offer a new "Short-form, Short-Term Schedule"
viewer that displays a one-line summary of each observation scheduled
in a user-specified week. Researchers coordinating observations with
other observatories should find this particularly useful. You can
find the new Short-Form Short-Term Schedule under the "Timelines &
Status" link on the XTE Homepage, or directly at:
http://rxte.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xte/SOF/Schedules/index.php
Please note that the full Short-Term Schedule (ironically called the
"Human-readable") remains available, and provides additional details
such as observing modes, good time periods, etc.
Mission-long light curves will soon be made public for those sources
which have been frequently observed during RXTE's 11 years to
date. These will include the PCA and HEXTE in several energy bands.
Details will be placed on the RXTE webpage when available.
http://rxte.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xte/xte_1st.html
Education and Public Outreadh
RXTE will distribute the educational booklets "Shedding a New Light on
the Universe" at the AstroZone event during the summer AAS meeting in
Hawaii. The booklets contain activities about the electromagnetic
spectrum, as well as a paper model of the satellite. Much of the
booklet content is reproduced on the RXTE learning center at
http://rxte.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xte/learning_center/universe/universe.html
To see a video highlighting RXTE and other high energy astrophysics
results, check out the YouTube Groovie Movie at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6mPDXSra5U
Back to Top
12. Suzaku News - Koji Mukai and Ilana Harrus (GSFC)
In April 2007, Suzaku has started observing Cycle 2 Guest Observer
(GO) targets, following the national reviews and international merging
meeting. On the US side, we received 156 proposals with an
oversubscription factor of 4.4; competitions were similarly strong for
proposals submitted to ISAS/JAXA and to ESA.
The HXD has been operating nominally for the last six months.
One of the four XIS units, on the other hand, developed a problem in
Nov 2006 and has not produced astronomically useful data since then.
A micrometeorite impact is a likely cause.
We plan to introduce Version 2 of the Suzaku processing pipeline in
June 2007. Complete details will be published at the time, but it
will include new calibration files and revised software to handle XIS
data taken with spaced-row charge injection (SCI). It is already
known that the SCI is a success. Without SCI, the spectral resolution
of the XIS shows a significant degradation due to radiation damage;
with SCI, the resolution is very close to the value at launch.
Therefore, the use of SCI is the norm for all new observations. The
public date for observations taken with SCI will be delayed until one
year after the availability of Version 2 processed data; in the
meantime, the XIS team has produced a workaround so that GOs can
analyze SCI-on data with current software to a useful degree.
The HXD team has been continuously studying the temporal and spectral
properties of the in-orbit detector background, by using the data
accumulated during Earth occultations. An empirical model has been
developed, and the estimated background is distributed to GOs as
"faked" event files. The reproducibility of the current model is
estimated to be smaller than 5%.
The Suzaku archive is scheduled to open on May 27, 2007, when most
of the Science Working Group data, obtained before Mar 31, 2006, will
become public. We also note that US-based investigator will be able
to request funding to analyze these data through Astrophysics Data
Analysis element of ROSES-2007, whose deadline is June 22, 2007.
The Suzaku special issue of the Publications of the Astronomical
Society of Japan (PASJ) is now available. It includes 30 papers,
both on instrumentation and on astrophysical results. The Suzaku
team is planning for a second Suzaku special issue of PASJ. The
deadline for submission is May 31, 2007. Guest Observers are welcome
to publish in this special issue; interested GOs should contact the
Suzaku project, through the Suzaku pages at ISAS/JAXA or the Suzaku
GOF page at NASA/GSFC.
Following on from the success of "the Extreme Universe in the Suzaku
Era" conference held in Kyoto in Dec 2006, we are organizing a similar
conference in the US. The conference is titled "Suzaku X-ray
Universe",
to be held Dec 10-12, 2007, in San Diego, and further details can be
found at:
http://www.confcon.com/suzaku2007/index.php
Suzaku EPO News:
Suzaku EPO activities have been quite diverse.
1) The Suzaku Educator Ambassador Marie Pool (Oklahoma) presented a
Suzaku workshop on March 30 at the NSTA (National Science Teacher
Association) National Conference in Saint Louis.
2) Jim Lochner and Sara Mitchell attended the "Celebration of Teaching
and Learning" in NYC (March 23-24) and distributed about 250 DVDs and
Teacher Guides to the attendees.
People interested in receiving either the DVD or the teacher guide can
contact us at:
http://suzaku-epo.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/suzaku-epo/contact/who.html
3) The new issue of the Suzaku Newsletter for Teachers "SuzNews" was
published in February. It is available for all teachers at:
http://suzaku-epo.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/suzaku-epo/newsletter/suznuz.html
4) The entire team is continuing the work with Marni Berendsen (ASP)
and the EPO group at Sonoma State University on finalizing the themes
and messages for the Extreme Universe Toolkit
for ASP's Night Sky Network. We also worked with them to suggest and
brainstorm activities to illustrate those messages.
Back to Top
13. GLAST Mission News - Steven Ritz (GSFC), Lynn Cominsky
(Sonoma State)
and Robert Naeye (SP Systems/GSFC)
Thanks to dedicated engineers, managers, and scientists, the
components have been assembled onto the spacecraft, which passed the
Pre-Environmental Review on April 11-12. The integrated spacecraft
will soon undergo more than four months of environmental testing at
General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, in Gilbert,
Az. Pictures of the observatory may be found here:
http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov/public/resources/images/.
Due to competition with other planned launches from Cape Canaveral and
other program considerations, the GLAST launch will occur no earlier
than December 14. The GLAST team is considering the options and
implications for a launch delay of up to a few months. Early planning
of guest activities at the launch has started.
Meetings and Workshops:
GLAST Users Committee meetings were held at Goddard on November 16-17,
2006, and at Stanford University on February 4, 2007. Telecons are
held about every two months. The next meeting will be at Goddard on
June 4-5, 2007.
A GLAST special session was held at the January AAS meeting in
Seattle.
On February 2 at Stanford, the Science Working Group reviewed the
expected performance of the LAT, the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM), and
the overall mission relative to the Science Requirements Document
(SRD). The SWG was very impressed and appreciated all the work that
has been done.
More than 350 scientists attended the First International GLAST
Symposium at Stanford from February 5-8. It was a great meeting, with
talks covering a wide variety of topics that GLAST will study. Visit
http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/symposium/2007/
to see a list of talks.
Guest investigator workshops were held near Washington, DC in January
(
http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/resources/workshop07/
), near
Chicago in April (
//www.hep.anl.gov/glast_workshop/index.html
),
and in Los Angeles in May
(
http://gamma1.astro.ucla.edu/glast_2007/
). Additional workshops are
being planned.
A LAT collaboration meeting was held the week of March 26 at Goddard,
and the next meeting will be held in late July at Stanford.
A workshop on VLBI in the GLAST Era was held on April 23-24 at Goddard.
GLAST project scientist Steve Ritz, along with deputy project
scientists Neil Gehrels and Julie McEnery, visited the Swift Mission
Operations Center at Penn State in March to discuss GLAST-Swift
cooperation.
Guest Investigator Opportunities:
The announcement for the first NASA-funded GLAST Guest Investigator
(GI) Cycle was released in March. This program provides an opportunity
for people at U.S. institutions to obtain financial support for GLAST
studies. The GI program includes funding opportunities for (1)
analysis of released data, (2) correlated GLAST-related
multi-wavelength observations, (3) GLAST-related theory, and (4)
GLAST-related analysis methodology. Proposals are due September 7,
with optional NOIs due on July 13. See
http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/
for more details.
To sign up for the GLAST News, send an email to:
majordomo@athena.gsfc.nasa.gov (leave the subject line blank). In the
body of the message, please write the following: subscribe glastnews
your-email-address.
GLAST E/PO News
The GLAST-sponsored PBS NOVA special "Monster of the Milky Way" first
aired on October 31, 2006, and can be downloaded at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blackhole/. The accompanying planetarium
show, "Black Holes: the Other Side of Infinity," is now playing at
Chicago's Adler Planetarium. Many attendees enjoyed a special February
screening at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, which was
held in conjunction with the first GLAST Science Symposium at Stanford
University. Sarah Silva and her colleagues presented the educational
aspects of this show in a poster at the January AAS meeting in
Seattle.
The GLAST-sponsored "Solar Supernova?" interactive web game has now
been released at http://mystery.sonoma.edu/.
In the mystery Professor
Starsapoppin tries to figure out what will happen to our Sun by
studying the evolution of many different types of stars.
Lynn Cominsky (Sonoma State) featured The Global Telescope Network
during an invited talk given in a special education session at
December's American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, titled
"Bringing Real-time Astronomical Observations into the Classroom."
Cominsky has also been invited to give a similar talk at the American
Association of Physics Teachers meeting in July 2007. In preparation
for launch, the GTN has been monitoring the visible light emitted from
two dozen blazars in support of GLAST science objectives for almost
two years now.
The GLAST Education and Public Outreach effort at Sonoma State is
gearing up for launch! The GLAST Paper Model is being beta-tested now
by volunteers who were recruited at March's LAT Team Collaboration
meeting at Goddard. It is one of the many products that will be
distributed to attendees at launch and is now available for download
at http://glast.sonoma.edu/materials.html.
Our first GLAST podcast, featuring an interview of LAT Principal
Investigator Peter Michelson, is now online at
http://glast.sonoma.edu/resources/multimedia/audio/index.html.
Be sure to tell friends about GLAST's new MySpace site and blog, which
is regularly updated to include mission news and images:
http://myspace.com/glast.
You can order custom GLAST logo products,
including shirts, clocks, teddy bears, and even custom GLAST
U.S. postage stamps at http://cafepress.com/glast.
GLAST Public Affairs
GLAST public affairs telecons have restarted and now occur on a
biweekly basis. Rob Gutro (GSFC) moderates these telecons, which focus
on coordination of press-related activities.
Rob Gutro is working on a Public Affairs Plan, which will describe
public affairs and outreach efforts, written materials, press events,
communications to NASA employees, creating and updating a website, and
more.
Robert Naeye (SP Systems/GSFC) wrote a press release about the
Pre-Environmental Review and environmental testing. It was issued on
April 11. More press releases will be issued in the months ahead to
inform the media about the mission and its schedule of milestone
events.
Among various other activities to promote the mission, Rob Gutro and
Robert Naeye are compiling a GLAST Science Writers Guide. The Guide is
intended to be a handy source of basic GLAST information for
journalists, and it is being based on successful Guides from other
missions.
Back to Top
14. Constellation X Mission Update - Jay Bookbinder for the
Con-X Team
The Con-X Science Enhancement Package Request for Information that was
released in October 2006 generated nearly a dozen white-paper
responses, with updated concepts for both gratings and hard X-ray
telescopes. Noteworthy is the fact that the grating concepts that
were submitted provide better resolution that the original baseline
configuration, and potentially higher throughput. The Project took
these concepts to the GSFC Integrated Mission Design Center (IMDC) in
December for a one-week, in-depth effort to refine the Con-X mission
configuration and observatory design, and to assess the impact of the
SEP. Innovative work by the IMDC staff and our engineers resulted in
a configuration that was able to accommodate both a hard X-ray
telescope and a grating within the mission constraints.
A Facility Science Team meeting was held at GSFC in December, with
approximately 100 people attending. The first day of the meeting was
dedicated to discussion of various options to enhance the low and high
energy capabilities of Con-X and a presentation of the IMDC efforts;
the next two days covered the science that would be done with a Con-X
configuration that included these enhancements. Based on these
discussions with the FST, we slightly revised the top level
requirements: the field of view of the calorimeter has been expanded
to 5x5 arcmin from the original 2.5x2.5 arcmin (and the goal was
increased to 10x10 arcmin), and the energy resolving power requirement
is now 1250 from 0.3 to 1.0 keV, up from the baseline of 300. These
changes will enhance our ability to study clusters and the WHIM,
respectively.
On the technical side of the program, the optics team is continuing
their efforts. Mirror coating stress studies, mirror alignment
concepts (both active and passive), mirror mounting schemes, glass
strength studies, optimization studies of the mirror segment size, and
the mirror segment fabrication efforts have all continued.
On the detector side, the TES calorimeter team at GSFC is now
routinely obtaining < 3 eV resolution FWHM at 6 keV using arrays with
electroplated Au absorbers, the best resolution is 2.3 eV. The main
discovery contributing to these results is the realization that
low-stress mounting of the arrays results in uniform transition
temperatures and requires application of no magnetic field (or a field
small compared to Earth's field) to maximize the transition
temperature.
In addition to the ongoing hardware development efforts, the Project
has begun a new effort to refine the Integration and Test activities,
including expected calibration needs.
Since our last update to the HEAD community, all of the Beyond
Einstein missions have devoted substantial effort to support a review
by the National Academy (National Research Council) Committee that was
requested by NASA and DOE. The charge to the Committee is to recommend
one of the Beyond Einstein missions to proceed first, drawing from
both the large observatories (Con-X and LISA), and the Probe-class
missions (JDEM, Black Hole Finder and Cosmic Inflation Probe). This
first mission will utilize a funding wedge that is planned in FY09.
More information on this review process, including the charge to the
Committee, is available at the Beyond Einstein Program Assessment
Committee (BEPAC) website:
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ssb/BeyondEinsteinPublic.html. The
formal Con-X presentations to the Committee can be found at our
website:
http://constellation.gsfc.nasa.gov/
The committee has now concluded its efforts at collecting public
inputs from the community as a whole at a series of town hall meetings
in Irvine, Cambridge, Baltimore and Chicago. At each of these
meetings, 5-minute oral presentations were selected from community
members who submitted abstracts, and all attendees had the opportunity
to speak during open-microphone sessions. The community is clearly
very supportive of Con-X, with over half of all of these talks in
support of Con-X. The wide range of presentations from the solid
state astrophysics of dust in the interstellar medium to the role of
feedback in the evolution of galaxy clusters gave evidence to the
committee of the breadth of science that can be addressed by the
Constellation X-ray mission.
In addition to supporting the public meetings of the BEPAC, the
Project has responded formally to a series of questions from the BEPAC
on a variety of technical and programmatic questions. The first set of
39 detailed questions was received in mid December, and a response due
near the end of January, it was a very active holiday season for the
team. Another set of 9 questions came from the committee in late
March, and responses were submitted in early April, and we are
currently working on the last question that we just received. The
committee's final report to NASA and DOE is due out in early
September, and we want to thank everyone who has helped in preparing
our responses, as well as those who have gone to the effort of
presenting their thoughts to the Committee!
Back to Top
15. LISA Mission Update - Tom Prince and Bonny Schumaker, JPL
NRC Beyond Einstein Program Assessment Committee (BEPAC)
As many of you know, the US National Research Council is assessing the
NASA Beyond Einstein Program in a major review over several
months. The first BEPAC meeting took place last Fall in Washington,
DC, followed by a meeting in Newport Beach in January and a third
meeting in Chicago at the beginning of April. The Newport Beach and
Chicago meetings included "town hall" sessions for community input.
Additional town hall meetings were held in Boston and in Baltimore.
The April meeting of the BEPAC in Chicago included an important
presentation by Dr. David Southwood, Director of Science for the
European Space Agency, who spoke on "LISA and LISA Pathfinder".
Viewgraphs from the presentation can be found at:
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ssb/BE_mtg_3_IL.html
These describe the current status of LISA and LISA Pathfinder within
ESA and also provide a description of recent decisions about the
Cosmic Visions Program within ESA.
The BEPAC plans to have one additional meeting in June and the
Committee is expected to present its recommendations in September.
LISA International Science Community (LISC)
The LISA International Science Community (LISC) is open to membership
for all people working on any aspect of LISA science, physics, or
technology and all researchers interested in learning more and keeping
informed about LISA. The LISC is maintained by the LISA
International Science Team for the purpose of exchanging information
about LISA with the wider science community. Currently, the LISC has
over 200 members from more than a hundred different institutions from
around the world (for a list of these institutions, see
http://www.lisascience.org/about-the-lisc/home-institutions ). To
join the LISC, visit
http://www.lisascience.org/joining-the-lisc.
People who are not directly involved in LISA research but who want to
be informed about LISA or participate in discussions may simply join
the LISC web portal, www.lisascience.org. The LISC web portal
features LISA-related news, introductory and advocacy resources,
useful links, and discussion boards among LISC members. A large
collection of material is available that can be used for lectures and
presentations about LISA at both public outreach and academic
levels. This includes images and many reports, articles, and other
documents. Links are provided for accessing all public LISA-related
publications, preprints, conference proceedings, and presentations,
such as those made recently to the Beyond Einstein Program Advisory
Committee of the National Academy of Sciences. For example, the most
current document describing and motivating the science to be
accomplished by LISA, titled "LISA: Probing the Universe with
Gravitational Waves," can be found at
http://www.lisascience.org/resources/talks-articles/science. Among
other regular LISA updates, the LISC portal also provides electronic
copies of past and current issues of the LISA Newsletter
(
http://www.lisascience.org/newsletter), hard copies of which are
available to LISC members.
Mock LISA Data Challenges (MLDC)
The Mock LISA Data Challenges (MLDC) are a program sponsored by the
LISA International Science Team to foster the development of LISA
data-analysis tools and capabilities, and to demonstrate the technical
readiness already achieved by the gravitational-wave community in
distilling a rich science payoff from the LISA data output. Each
challenge in the series involves the distribution of several datasets,
encoded in a simple standard format, and containing combinations of
the fundamental LISA noises with the signals from one or more LISA
gravitational-wave sources of undisclosed parameters. Challenge
participants are asked to return the maximum amount of information
about the GW sources, and to produce technical notes detailing their
work.
The Challenge-1 datasets, including signals from isolated or mildly
interfering sources featured in the LISA minimum requirements (compact
Galactic binaries and supermassive black-hole binaries) were released
in June 2006. Results were due at the beginning of December, and were
presented shortly thereafter at Postdam's 11th Gravitational-Wave
Data-Analysis Workshop (see gr-qc/0701139). Ten collaborations
submitted entries, covering all source classes, and adopting many
different data-analysis methods. Several results were spot-on; others
identified differences in conventions and other minor problems; all
provided useful information to understand LISA data analysis and move
on to the next stage of the MLDC program.
Challenge-2 datasets, introducing the problem of global analysis in
the LISA data (and including signals from a 30-million-source Galactic
model and from 4-6 massive black hole binaries and 5
extreme-mass-ratio inspirals) were distributed at the end of January
(see gr-qc/0701170). Results are due on June 15, in time to be
presented and discussed at the Sydney Amaldi meeting. Challenge 3, to
be released at the end of 2007, is expected to introduce yet more LISA
sources, such as bursts and stochastic backgrounds, and to include
more refined models of Galactic binary and massive--black-hole binary--
--waveforms.
We encourage all interested parties to participate in the
challenges. To learn more about them (or even enroll!), please visit
the official MLDC website (
http://astrogravs.nasa.gov/docs/mldc),
which includes links to the challenge datasets and to a variety of
useful software tools, including the LISA simulators used to generate
the datasets, and code libraries to read them. For more information,
contact the MLDC Taskforce co-chairs Alberto Vecchio
(av@star.sr.bham.ac.uk) and Michele Vallisneri
(Michele.Vallisneri@jpl.nasa.gov).
Black Hole Merger Simulations
Progress in simulating binary black hole (BBH) mergers continues at an
impressive rate, with a number of key results emerging in the past few
months.
For equal mass nonspinning black holes, longer simulations with
roughly 7 orbits followed by the merger and ringdown are now available
(Baker et al., gr-qc/0612117). These waveforms have been used to
calculate signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) for various detectors,
demonstrating the improvement in SNR expected from the addition of
the merger signal. In particular, advanced LIGO can achieve SNR > 10
for some intermediate mass BBHs out to z ~ 1, and SNR > 100 across the
Local Supercluster. LISA can see massive BBHs in the range 3 10^4 <
M/M_sun < 10^7 at SNR > 100 out to the earliest epochs of structure
formation at z > 15.
Early work in 2006 hinted that the numerical relativity waveforms in
the late part of the inspiral, prior to merger, were strikingly close
to those calculated by post-Newtonian (PN) techniques. Recently,
quantitative comparisons between the PN and numerical relativity
results have been carried out (Buonanno, Cook, and Pretorius,
gr-qc/0610122; Baker et al., gr-qc/0612024), showing that the
numerically calculated waveforms are very close to those calculated
using 3.5 PN analytic techniques, and in particular to the 3.5 PN
templates used for LIGO data analysis, as confirmed in a recent paper
by Pan et al. (arXiv:0704.1964).
Calculations of recoil kicks from mergers of spinning BBHs made big
news early in 2007, and especially caught the attention of
astrophysicists. Simulations of equal mass BBHs with spins aligned or
anti-aligned with the orbital angular momentum produced kick
velocities up to ~ 400 km/s for BHs with a/m ~ 0.8 (Herrmann et al.,
gr-qc/0701143; Koppitz et al., gr-qc/0701163); these
aligned/anti-aligned results can be modeled to within 10% (Baker et
al., astro-ph/0702390). These kicks are more than double the maximum
kick velocity ~ 176 km/s for q ~ 0.36 calculated for nonequal mass,
nonspinning BBHs (Gonzalez et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 091101, 2007,
and gr-qc/0610154).
Even more surprising were the much larger kick velocities found for
mergers of BBHs with their spins initially in the orbital
plane. Gonzalez et al. (gr-qc/0702052) and Tichy & Marronetti
(gr-qc/0703075) demonstrate kick velocities ~ 2000 km/s, and
Campanelli et al. (gr-qc/0701164) predict possible kicks velocities as
large as 4000 km/s! Numerical relativists are continuing to explore
this very interesting parameter space...stay tuned!
Back to Top
16. Meeting Announcements - a partial list!
Editor's note: A list of international astronomical meetings can be
found at
http://cadcwww.dao.nrc.ca/meetings/meetings.html
Below are listed meetings that may be of interest to HEAD members, and
particularly those where the meeting organizers have asked to have
their meeting announcement included in the HEAD newsletter.
Obscured AGN across Cosmic Time
Kloster Seeon, Bavaria, Germany 5-7 June 2007
Current deep surveys, notably in X-rays and the mid-IR, are making it
possible to carry out a census of essentially all the luminous AGN in
the universe. By penetrating the obscuration that, in Type II sources,
hides the nuclear regions in the UV to the near-IR spectrum, these new
surveys are finding the radio quiet counterparts of the powerful radio
galaxies.
The completion of such a census has substantial cosmological
significance since it will provide the foundation for identifying the
role of AGN feedback in the galaxy formation process. The Type II
sources are of particular value here since, by acting as their own
coronographs, they facilitate the study of the star formation activity
and the investigation of the correlated growth of the black hole and
the host galaxy.
While radio galaxies - which are being used to trace the massive
galaxy population at all epochs - have been studied intensively for
the past 40 years, their radio quiet counterparts beyond the local
universe are only now being discovered in substantial numbers. The
workshop aims to bring together the established radio galaxy community
with the students of the radio quiet sources and so help to elucidate
the effects of the (possibly) different host galaxies and environment
and those of the powerful radio jets. More information at
http://www.eso.org/gen-fac/meetings/agnii2007/
"X-ray surveys: Evolution of accretion, star-formation
and the large scale structure", Rodos island, Greece
2 - 6 July, 2007
Chandra and XMM-Newton extragalactic surveys have provided a wealth of
exciting discoveries in the past few years. The largest fraction of
the X-ray backgound has been resolved yielding the strongest
constraints yet on the accretion history of the Universe. XMM-Newton
systematically detects clusters of galaxies at high redshift providing
invaluable cosmological information. Parallel to the observational
constraints, theoretical modelling of cluster formation and evolution
has also seen tremendous progress in the past few years. At the same
time a large number of X-ray selected normal galaxies have been
detected in both deep fields and wide field bright surveys, helping us
to probe for the first time the star-formation rate and its evolution
in X-ray wavelengths. Large area contiguous surveys start to probe
the AGN clustering properties and their environment. The scope of the
meeting is to examine in detail such recent X-ray survey findings and
their cosmolog\ ical implications, paving the way for future X-ray
missions.
Additional information can be obtained at
email: xray07@astro.noa.gr or
www : www.astro.noa.gr/~xray07
"XMM-Newton: The Next Decade"
XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre, European Space Astronomy Centre,
Madrid, Spain 4-6 June 2007
Thanks to the recent generation of high energy observatories,
astrophysics is witnessing a golden age of discovery in the X-ray
domain. Current technical evaluation demonstrates that the XMM-Newton
spacecraft and its scientific instruments can continue to provide
first class X-ray observations far into the next decade. Other
missions to be launched soon, like Herschel, Planck, GLAST, as well as
new ground-based developments, will open up new challenging
opportunities for multi-wavelength and follow-up observations to which
XMM-Newton is ideally placed to make a major contribution.
The workshop will summarise our current knowledge of X-ray
astrophysics, discuss some of the major achievements of the past years
and identify the fundamental questions still to be addressed. With
this starting point, the main focus of the workshop will be to
identify the scientific topics with the highest scientific importance
and impact and the observing programs of maximum long-term value to
the entire astronomical community. These programs may require large
amounts of observing time on one or more targets or sky areas,
collaborations of many astronomers from several institutions,
innovative ideas or applications, or modified instrument modes.
The workshop program will include invited speakers, a discussion
panel, and both oral and poster sessions enabling all participants to
present their ideas related to programs for the next decade in the
life of XMM-Newton and their needs for new operating modes.
web site:
http://xmm.esac.esa.int/external/xmm_science/workshops/2007_science/
"Tracing Cosmic Evolution with Clusters of
Galaxies: Six Years Later" Sesto Pusteria, Italy June 25-29 2007
Over the last six years, a host of new multi-wavelength observations
have substantially changed our view of galaxy clusters, have fueled
significant progress in our understanding of their formation and
evolution, and at the same time have opened new outstanding
questions. New X-ray observations have revealed the complexity of the
Intra- Cluster Medium which challenge our physical models. An
increasing number of studies of clusters at z>1 have shed new light on
the epoch and formation history of cluster galaxies in contrast with
those in lower density environments. The application of gravitational
lensing techniques on spectacular HST-ACS data has allowed the dark
matter mass distribution in the inner cores of cluster halos to be
investigated. The much wider dynamical ranges now accessible to
numerical simulations have led to a new understanding of the
achievements and of the shortcomings of the current modelling of
galaxy clusters in the cosmological framework.
The aim of this conference is to bring together both theoreticians and
observational astronomers working at different wavelengths to discuss
both recent results and future prospects in the study of cosmic
evolution through galaxy clusters.
web site:
http://www.si.inaf.it/sesto2007/
"Obscured AGN across Cosmic Time"
Kloster Seeon, Bavaria, Germany 5-7 June 2007
Current deep surveys, notably in X-rays and the mid-IR, are making it
possible to carry out a census of essentially all the luminous AGN in
the universe. By penetrating the obscuration that, in Type II sources,
hides the nuclear regions in the UV to the near-IR spectrum, these new
surveys are finding the radio quiet counterparts of the powerful radio
galaxies.
The completion of such a census has substantial cosmological
significance since it will provide the foundation for identifying the
role of AGN feedback in the galaxy formation process. The Type II
sources are of particular value here since, by acting as their own
coronographs, they facilitate the study of the star formation activity
and the investigation of the correlated growth of the black hole and
the host galaxy.
While radio galaxies - which are being used to trace the massive
galaxy population at all epochs - have been studied intensively for
the past 40 years, their radio quiet counterparts beyond the local
universe are only now being discovered in substantial numbers. The
workshop aims to bring together the established radio galaxy community
with the students of the radio quiet sources and so help to elucidate
the effects of the (possibly) different host galaxies and environment
and those of the powerful radio jets. More information at
http://www.eso.org/gen-fac/meetings/agnii2007/
"Forty Years of X-ray Astronomy: A Workshop in
honor of Gordon Garmire's 70th birthday, Penn State University
14 - 15 June, 2007
To celebrate the 70th birthday of Evan Pugh Professor Gordon P.
Garmire, Penn State University is organizing a 2-day workshop on
instrumentation in high energy astrophysics. Projects from the
1960s-2000s in which Gordon played a major role will be reviewed:
OSO-3, HEAO-1, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Brief
presentations will present recent science emerging from Gordon's
Chandra team. Most of the workshop will feature presentations and
discussion on current developments and future prospects for advanced
technologies in high energy astrophysics. The workshop Web site
lists the invited speakers.
*** Contributed papers on the latest developments in detectors, optics
and mission concepts for X-ray astronomy are warmly invited. ***
Please see the workshop Web site, http://www.astro.psu.edu/40yrs,
fill out a registration form, and
join us in June. Registration deadline: April 15 2007
"SciNeGHE07:
Fifth Workshop on Science with the New Generation of High Energy
Gamma-ray Experiments" Villa Mondragone, Frascati, Rome, (Italy)
June 18 - 20;
website: http://www.roma2.infn.it/SciNeGHE07/
This will be the fifth of a series of Workshops on High Energy Gamma-
ray Experiments, following the Conferences held in Perugia 2003,
Bari 2004, Cividale del Friuli 2005, Elba Island 2006.
This year the focus will be on the use of gamma-ray to study the Dark
Matter component of the Universe, the origin and propagation of
Cosmic Rays, Extra Large Spatial Dimensions and Tests of Lorentz
Invariance. An update on the current and planned research for space-
borne and ground- based experiments dedicated to the observation of
the gamma-ray sky will be given. Among the participants there are
both hardened veterans of the first dedicated gamma-ray missions
(like SAS-2 COS-B, CGRO) and young students entering the fascinating
field of gamma-ray astrophysics participating in the new generation
of high energy gamma-ray astrophysics experiments like GLAST, AGILE,
MAGIC, HESS, VERITAS and ARGO.
"Astrophysics of Compact Objects"
Huangshan, China
1 - 7 July, 2007
The meeting will address recent observational and theoretical
developments in the study of neutron stars, black holes and white
dwarfs, including their various observational manifestations such as
pulsars, magnetars, x-ray binaries, supernovae and gamma ray bursts,
as well as future observational prospects (such as gravitational
waves). While the meeting will focus on stellar compact objects, the
common astrophysics (such as accretion) associated with both galactic
and supermassive black holes will be covered. The meeting will
take place in the tourist city of Huangshan, near the world famous
Huangshan mountain (Yellow Mountain).
Contributed papers on the latest developments in compact object
research
are warmly invited. Abstract submission deadline: May 1, 2007.
registration deadline: May 15, 2007. Meeting web site:
http://www.cfa.ustc.edu.cn/meeting/aco/
"X-ray surveys: Evolution of accretion,
star-formation
and the large scale structure", Rodos island, Greece
2 - 6 July, 2007
Chandra and XMM-Newton extragalactic surveys have provided a wealth of
exciting discoveries in the past few years. The largest fraction of
the X-ray backgound has been resolved yielding the strongest
constraints yet on the accretion history of the Universe. XMM-Newton
systematically detects clusters of galaxies at high redshift providing
invaluable cosmological information. Parallel to the observational
constraints, theoretical modelling of cluster formation and evolution
has also seen tremendous progress in the past few years. At the same
time a large number of X-ray selected normal galaxies have been
detected in both deep fields and wide field bright surveys, helping us
to probe for the first time the star-formation rate and its evolution
in X-ray wavelengths. Large area contiguous surveys start to probe
the AGN clustering properties and their environment. The scope of the
meeting is to examine in detail such recent X-ray survey findings and
their cosmolog\ ical implications, paving the way for future X-ray
missions.
Additional information can be obtained at
email: xray07@astro.noa.gr or
www : www.astro.noa.gr/~xray07
" X-ray Grating Spectroscopy: Kinematics and
Conditions in Hot Gas" Cambridge, MA
July 11-13
Workshop Goals: review progress afforded by X-ray grating spectroscopy of
extragalactic and galactic sources; compare/contrast physical conditions, estimates of location,
geometry and kinematics of X-ray emitters/absorbers,
encompassing collisionally and photo-excited gas across
different source types; review and compare available atomic data
and codes, and provide a forum for discussion of
controversial or unexpected new results and potential new strategies for Chandra/XMM grating
observations. Web site: http://cxc.harvard.edu/xgratings07
"The Fifth International X-ray Astronomy
School", Washington DC
Aug 6-10
There are currently five operating X-ray astronomy satellites,
Chandra, RXTE, Swift, Suzaku, and XMM-Newton, in addition to the
on-line archives from earlier missions. X-ray astronomy is thus an
important resource for research in many topics in
astrophysics. However, many astronomers have never analyzed X-ray data
and do not have a clear idea of the methods and challenges involved.
To enable young astronomers to get a good command of an important
sub-topic in astronomy, we are organizing our fifth X-ray school
intended for graduate students and recent postdocs who want to
understand the intricacies of X-ray astronomy.
The emphasis will be on the foundations of X-ray astronomy rather than
on any particular software tools. However, the school does include a
hands-on component in which participants will analyze an X-ray dataset
of their choice using the standard software. The school is organized
jointly by the HEASARC, the Chandra X-ray Center, CRESST, and the
Physics Department, The George Washington University.
More information can be found at
http://xrayschool.gsfc.nasa.gov
"40 Years of Pulsars: Millisecond Pulsars,
Magnetars, and More", McGill University Montreal, Canada
Aug 12-17
Science topics include: Pulsar searches and timing; accretion and recycling; millisecond
pulsars in the field and in globular clusters; young neutron stars,
including magnetars, traditional Crab-like pulsars, and isolated
neutron stars; glitches, precession, and nulling; binary pulsars,
including the double pulsar; constraints on mass, radius, and the
equation of state; new and future instrumentation.
The meeting will also include brief anecdotal talks from eminent
pulsar researchers, giving their personal recollections of important
moments in pulsar history.
Andrew Cumming and Vicky Kaspi are the Co-Organizers. The conference
website is http://www.ns2007.org
"Legacy of Multi-wavelength Surveys"
Xining, China
August 19-25
Astronomy won't progress much without systematic multiwavelength
surveys, and the star formation is one of the most fundamental
processes linking essentially every aspect of the physical phenomena
in the Universe. We have witnessed explosive growth in survey data in
the last decade of both systematic ground-based "entire" sky surveys
such as SDSS and 2MASS and dedicated surveys of both ground and space
based, like SINGS, CFHT, SWIRE, COSMOS, GOODS, and AEGIS etc. Many
surveys are forthcoming, particularly with facilities coming online
such as AKARI(Astro-F), SCUBA2, Herschel, WISE, LMT, to name a few,
and eventually ALMA, JWST. Multi-wavelength studies of galaxies at
high redshifts require knowledge of more detailed physics on star
formation and AGN from studies of local galaxies including our
own. This meeting tries to establish a connection between people from
both sides, to better understand star formation near and far, and
examine progress that has been made so far.
China is devoted to develop astronomical facilitites (LAMOST, FAST)
for surveys as well. It is therefore timely to bring together many of
the leading figures of the large survey programs and users of these
survey data, to discuss how to best exploit these datasets, and pass
the legacy to the new generations.
The meeting location Xining, gateway to Lhasa, Tibet by the Sky Train,
is the capital city of Qinghai province. Xining. Web site: http://sfig.pmo.ac.cn/xining
"TeV Particle Astrophysics"
Venice, Italy
August 27-31
In 2007 - 2008, the Large Hadron Collider will start exploring the TeV
frontier, searching for signals of Physics beyond the Standard
model. Meanwhile, several Particle Astrophysics experiments are about
to start, or have already started, the exploration of the Universe at
similar, and much higher, energies.
It is therefore timely to focus on the interplay between astrophysical
observations and fundamental physics at the TeV scale, and to prepare
common strategies to interpret new data in a consistent picture.
The aim of the workshop is to understand what we can learn from
present and upcoming experiments at the TeV scale and above, and what
are the prospects for discovering and understanding new physics with
accelerator and astrophysical searches. web site:
http://www.pd.infn.it/TeV
"The Suzaku X-ray Universe"
San Diego, CA
December 10-12, 2007
This conference will highlight results from the 5th Japanese satellite
Suzaku (Astro-EII)
http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/enterp/missions/suzaku/index.shtml
which was launched on July 10, 2005. It will be the first to present
the results of both the performance verification phase and guest
observer program. The conference topics will cover all aspects of the
mission science, from stellar astrophysics to the most distant
quasars. The conference is hosted by the University of California, San
Diego, with the conference located at the Catamaran Resort Hotel,
located on Mission Bay in San Diego.
To register for the meeting please go to the conference web site:
http://www.confcon.com/suzaku2007/index.php
HEAD Meetings
This serves as a partial archive of upcoming and
recent HEAD meetings. Access to Web sites of past HEAD meetings,
including abstracts and programs, is subject to availability
on remote servers.
HEAD Tenth Divisional Meeting, 2008,
March31 - April 3, 2008, Los Angelos, CA.
17. Obituaries for Kenneth Greisen, Herb Gursky and Bohdan Paczynski
HEAD co-founder and cosmic ray pioneer Kenneth I. Greisen
Kenneth Ingvard Greisen, a cosmic ray pioneer and a co-founder of the
HEAD, died on March 17 in Ithaca, N.Y at age 89.
Dr. Greisen's name will be remembered as the first author on a paper
describing the GZK cutoff, a theory he developed with Drs. Georgi
Zatsepin and Vadim Kuzmin. The theory predicts an upper limit to the
energy of cosmic rays due to their interactions with the CMB.
Dr. Greisen was one of the HEAD's founding members, and served as its
first chair in 1970-71. In an article published in "The AAS's First
Century" on the history of HEAD, Dr. Virginia Trimble recalls the
debates on the definition of high-energy astrophysics and the role of
the division. The HEAD was initially conceived to prevent the creation
of a complete separated society that would, to quote Riccardo
Giacconi, "see that X-ray astronomy was properly represented at
meetings." The division's creation also increased contacts between
astronomers and physicists working on similar subjects.
Kenneth I. Greisen was born in New Jersey. He graduated from Franklin
and Marshall College in 1938 and earned his doctorate in physics from
Cornell in 1942. He remained at Cornell for the remainder of his
career, except for the time he spent working in Los Alamos on the
Manhattan Project from 1943 to 1946. Dr. Greisen is survived by a son,
Eric Greisen of New Mexico; a daughter, Kathryn Greisen of Ohio;
stepchildren Heather Wiltberger of Virginia, Lois Wiltberger of
Massachusetts, and Paul Wiltberger of Washington state; and two
grandchildren.
Herbert Gursky, co-discoverer of the first cosmic X-ray source
Herb Gursky, Riccardo Giacconi, Frank Paolini, and Bruno Rossi carried
out the rocket flight in 1962 that detected the first cosmic source of
X-ray emission, Sco X-1. At American Science and Enginineering, Herb
was vice president for space research and also analysed observations
from the Uhuru satellite, of galactic sources (e.g. recognizing that
the optical counterparts of X-ray sources could be bright stars
(e.g. 1700-37 and 0900-40), not relatively faint as found for Sco X-1)
and noted the association of Uhuru X-ray sources with clusters of
galaxies. At AS&E, Herb also worked on solar physics and
magnetospheric research. In 1973, Herb moved to the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory where he was also a professor in the Harvard
Department of Astronomy. He helped oversee the completion of the
Mount Hopkins, Multiple Mirror Telescope, a joint project of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of
Arizona.
Herb joined the NRL in 1981 and became principal investigator for
several NASA satellites. During his career, he co-edited two books and
wrote authored more than 100 articles on X-ray astronomy.
Herb died December 1 at the age of 76. He is survived by his wife
Flora Aronson Gursky of Great Falls, Virginia, two sons, David Gursky
of Las Vegas and Robert Gursky of Glastonbury, Conn., a brother, and
three grandchildren.
Bohdan Paczynski - Theoretical Astrophysicist
Bohdan Paczynski contributed substantially to our understanding in
many areas of astrophysics and opened new areas of research. In the
1980's, in one of his best known papers (Gravitational microlensing by
the galactic halo", ApJ 304, 1) he demonstrated how monitoring the
brightness of millions of stars could detect microlensing events which
could be used to determine the nature of dark objects in the halo of
the Milky Way. In 1995, Professor Paczynski engaged in a debate with
Don Lamb, held at the Smithsonian Washington, over the nature and
origin of gamma ray bursts, arguing that they were very energetic
events originating at cosmological distances. Don Lamb argued for a
much more local origin to explain their isotropic distribution in the
sky. In 1997, the first measure of a redshift from an optical
afterglow of a burst showed that bursts had a cosmological origin,
from galaxies other than our own, and to quote Don Lamb "showed how
incredibly prescient Bohdan Paczynski had been in his work."
Dr. Paczynski helped to establish the Optical Gravitational Lensing
Experiment to measure stellar variability, which operates from
a telescope at Las Campanas Chile. Data is shared on the internet.
The OGLE program also identified extrasolar planets,
detecting them by the slight dimming of the star as its planet
passed between it and the Earth.
More recently, Dr. Paczynski and Grzegorz Pojmanski of Warsaw University
began the All Sky Automated Survey, which monitors stellar variability
over large areas of the sky. The pilot project
has already discovered 50,000 variable stars in the southern skies, as
well as two comets.
Dr. Paczynski died on April 19 at the age of 67. He is survived by
his wife Hanna, a son, Martin, of Somerville, Mass., a daughter,
Agnieszka, of Washington, and a grandchild.
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HEADNEWS, the electronic newsletter of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society, is issued twice yearly by the HEAD Secretary-Treasurer. The HEAD Executive Committee Members are:
