Subject: SNEWS: AAS meeting report
From: Alec Habig (habig@budoe.bu.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 19 2000 - 12:15:19 EST
Hi SNEWSers,
The American Astronomical Society meeting last week in Atlanta went
well. Short talks were contributed by me (Alec Habig) introducing SNEWS
in general, with an emphasis on what issues astronomers should be
thinking about and planning for, and by Clarence Virtue, outlining the
steps SNEWS will take to verify both absolute and relative timing
between the experiments. Also, Alex Murphy presented a poster on the
current plans for OMNIS.
Invited talks on their respective "New nu Observatories" were given by
Yoji Totsuka (Super-K), Art McDonald (SNO), and Buford Price (AMANDA).
These talks emphasized the astronomical work the neutrino experiments
are doing, including supernova detection and their participation in the
SNEWS network.
The SNEWS and neutrino talks were all well received. Certainly, the
goal of introducing ourselves to the astronomical community was
accomplished - a decent fraction of the random people I talked to during
the meeting knew what we were about (and I of course filled in the
rest!). Having the experimental spokesmen endorse us in their talks
certainly has helped our credibility. To continue this effort, when we
go fully online this year in an automated way, I hope to have a short
On the astronomical front, I was very impressed by the sheer quantity of
high-quality data pouring in across all wavelengths. New telescopes and
satellites (most notably the Chandra X-ray observatory) either have just
come online or will do so very soon. The 2-micron and Sloan all-sky
surveys are rolling, with much of the resulting data available for
whomever wants to grab it off the web. RXTE continues to sort out the
details of neutron star and black hole systems in astounding detail.
Even the traditionally murky fields of cosmological-scale stellar
evolution and galactic evolution are getting compelling data to support
or reject models. Everybody's error bars were looking more like high
energy physics plots than what you might be used to from astronomy. It
looks like the observers are finally cranking out enough reasonably
precise data to keep the theorists and modelers busy for quite some
time.
All in all it was fun and informative. I look forward to the AAS
meeting where we can present our observations of the next blast of
supernova neutrinos!
Alec
--
Alec Habig, Boston University Particle Astrophysics Group
habig@budoe.bu.edu
http://hep.bu.edu/~habig/
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