Scialog: Time Domain Astrophysics, 2018
The third Scialog: Time Domain Astrophysics meeting drew 47 Scialog fellows – more than half of them new to the innovative process of free-wheeling dialog and subsequent team formation – and 11 distinguished facilitators. They met in Tucson, Arizona, May 31-June 3. One of the main topics, and the reason for so many new faces, was the massive data release in April from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory.
Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the galaxy. Gaia provides unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of more than a billion stars, roughly one per cent of the total galactic stellar population.
Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) and the Heising-Simons Foundation cosponsored the Scialog.
RCSA President Daniel Linzer likened the disruption caused by the recent Gaia data release to the one caused fifteen years ago by the Human Genome Project – Gaia is opening up completely new opportunities for fundamental research in astrophysics and astronomy that undoubtedly will give rise to decades of major achievements, just as the complete mapping of the human genome has done for basic biological research and medical science.
Keynote speakers at the conference included:
Hans-Walter Rix, director, Department Galaxies and Cosmology at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. Over the past decade Rix’s research has increasingly focused on taking the Milky Way as a model “organism” for understanding galaxy formation in general. He discussed how Gaia is changing the field of galactic archeology and stellar physics.
Boris Gänsicke, professor, Department of Physics at the University of Warwick. An astrophysicist interested in the formation, evolution, and demise of stars and their planetary systems, Gänsicke discussed possible quantum leaps in astronomy that the Gaia data may enable. He focused on how future large spectroscopic and photometric surveys could augment our understanding of stars in quantity and quality.
Keivan Stassun, professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt University. A Cottrell Scholar, Stassun is co-investigator for the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission and chairs the executive committee of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. He noted that combining data from current and upcoming all-sky surveys, including Gaia, TESS and the fifth Sloan Digital Sky Survey “will enable accurate, empirical measurements of fundamental properties for millions of starts throughout the Milky way – including an increase by four orders of magnitude in the number of stars with reliable parallaxes, two orders of magnitude in the number with ultraprecise light curves, and two orders of magnitude in the number with detailed chemical abundances.”
The unique Scialog format limits formal presentations and devotes the vast majority of the conference to small breakout discussions to identify risky blue sky ideas for new lines of research and form new collaborative interdisciplinary teams to pursue these ideas. Significant time is devoted to team proposal writing.
This three-day process yielded research proposals from 30 newly formed teams on cutting edge topics in stellar and galactic astrophysics. RCSA Senior Program Director Richard Wiener said the high quality of proposed projects promises to make selection of five to six projects very challenging. The Scialog Advisory Committee will be making funding recommendations in July.
The conference’s senior discussion facilitators included Gänsicke, Rix and Stassun as well as Lars Bildsten, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Suzanne Hawley, divisional dean for the natural sciences and professor of astronomy at the University of Washington; Daniel Jaffe, vice president for research and professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin; Juna Kollmeier, director of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science; Knut Olsen, an astronomer with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory; Marc Pinsonneault, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University; and Thomas Prince, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology holding a joint appointment with Caltech's NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The Scialog TDA conference booklet contains a list of Scialog Fellows who attended the conference – a truly impressive cadre of early career rising stars.
