Washington, DC, 6-10 January 2002

Monday, 7 January 2002

High Resolution Images from the Hubble & Keck-I Telescopes:An Uncommon Dust Event in a Binary Star System

Peter Garnavich (left, U. Notre Dame) presented Hubble Space Telescope observations of a light echo around a supernova in an external galaxy.  John Monnier (center, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and William Danchi (right, Goddard Space Flight Center) released aperture-masked Keck Telescope images of the time-dependent creation of dust in the colliding winds of a 7.9-year binary system composed of a Wolf-Rayet star and an O star.

Discoveries from the Gemini-North and Keck Telescopes

Ray Jayawardhana (left, University of California, Berkeley) found a likely protoplanetary disk, nearly edge-on as seen from Earth, in a quadruple star system.  Michael Liu (right, University of Hawaii) discovered a roughly 65-Jupiter-mass brown dwarf orbiting a solar analogue star at a projected radial distance of just 14 Astronomical Units.  Alan Boss (center, Carnegie Institution of Washington) commented on the significance of these findings.

Reporters Retrospective: "Remember the Leonids!"

Robert Nemiroff (left, Michigan Technological University & "Astronomy Picture of the Day") and 
Peter Jenniskens (right SETI Institute Astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center) displayed the best still and video images of the Leonid Meteor Storm of November 2001.

Tuesday, 8 January 2002

New Findings From the Chandra & FUSE Orbiting Observatories

Above: Brian McNamara (Ohio University), here pointing to dark spot in an X-ray image of hot gas in a cluster of galaxies, described process by which "ghost cavities" rise buoyantly through a cluster from the central radio source of a galaxy.  The research used the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Kenneth Sembach (Space Telescope Science Institute) announced evidence suggesting the existence of a much larger, thinner, and hotter gas corona around the Milky Way than previously observed.  The result, based on observations of ionized oxygen emission from high velocity clouds, was obtained with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE).

Edward Murphy (University of Virginia) reported what may be the best evidence yet for the presence of a "galactic fountain" in a spiral galaxy beyond the Milky Way.  His report was based on FUSE observations of the edge-on spiral NGC 4631, also called the "Whale Galaxy."

The Reporters' Q&A with the President's Science Advisor, Dr. John H. Marburger III, Director of the Office of Science and Technology

Dr. John Marburger, III, Science Advisor to President George W. Bush, took questions from journalists at the AAS meeting.  AAS Deputy Press Officer Lynn Cominsky (at right) presided.

Science Advisor Marburger (foreground, back to camera), talked to reporters after addressing the meeting. Among journalists on hand were (left to right) Thomas Donlan (with tie and glasses; Barrons), K. C. Cole (dark glasses; Los Angeles Times), and Peter Spotts (in profile, far right; Christian Science Monitor).

Wednesday, 9 January 2002

First Observations & Images from the SAO/ASIAA Submillimeter Array

Announcing the first images from the new SAO/ASIAA Submillimeter Array on Mauna Kea were (left-to-right) James Moran and Paul Ho (both, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory) and Fred Lo, Director of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Academia Sinica in Taipei.

Expert researchers with the new Array, reporting their first findings at the meeting, were (left-to-right) 
Mark Gurwell (studied Mars), Kenneth Young (observed the Egg Nebula and a Young Stellar Object), and Jun-Hui Zhao (investigating the galactic nucleus source as well as NGC 253), all of Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

New Views of the Milky Way in X-rays, Radio & Infrared

Modern explorers of the Milky Way, three researchers announced their latest findings on our Galaxy.

Michael Skrutskie (at left, University of Virginia) produced a map of the galactic disk using thousands of carbon stars from the 2MASS infrared database as “standard candles.”  It gives an especially fine view of the galactic bar.

David Helfand (center, Columbia University) gave a progress report on a survey of a large region of the galactic plane with the Very Large Array and the XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray observatory; he finds large numbers of previously unknown supernova remnants, including one close cousin of the Crab Nebula.

Q. Daniel Wang (right, University of Massachusetts-Amherst) revealed a Chandra mosaic survey of a 400-900 light year region around the galactic center.  It includes about1000 previously unknown discrete X-ray sources, likely to be accreting white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes, “seen” through a fog of extremely hot gas, all around the central supermassive black hole, Sgr A*.

Thursday, 10 January 2002

Orion Nebula: The 1st Combined Image from the Very Large Array and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope.

Researchers from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory released what they described as the best single-dish radio telescope image of the Orion Nebula, taken with the new Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), and the first image based on combined data from the GBT and the Very Large Array.  From left-to-right they are Joseph McMullin, Debra Shepherd, and Ronald Maddalena.

Searching for the Nearest Stars.

Members of the RECONS project from Georgia State University described recent discoveries of stars near the Sun, including a triple star consisting of a white dwarf and two red dwarfs.  From left-to-right, they are Wei-Chun Jao, John Subasavage and project leader Todd J. Henry.

Featured Report – “The Color of the Universe”

Observational cosmologists Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook (both, Johns Hopkins University) reported that through analysis of data from the 2dF survey, they have determined what may be the present-day “color of the universe.” It is, they said, pale turquoise.  In this close-up, Baldry points to a square of approximately that color.