The American Astronomical Society (AAS) holds two annual meetings, the larger being in January. With attendance of around nearly 3000, there are always lots of exciting announcements in a variety of areas of astronomy, cosmology, technology, education, and more. This year’s winter AAS was held January 7 - 12 in Austin, Texas.
This year, for the first time, LCOGT had a booth in the exhibit hall in addition to several talks and posters. Within our 10' x 10' x 8' space, we had something from many of the niches of LCOGT. This included a world map with a shadow moving across the face with the telescope sites changing from red to green as night fell on those sites projecting on a 50” TV to emphasis the capabilities of the network (created by BJ Fulton and Jessica Barton), a 1-meter filter wheel (which will be part of Sinistro) which happily spun around awing everyone for the entire week, the moving focuser and filter wheel for the high speed camera, slides shows about the main science areas that LCOGT scientists are participating in and all of the software and engineering being done, and a laptop set up where everyone can try out the education software such as Agent Exoplanet. The background panels began with a photo by Rob Ratkowski/Maui and was edited by Federica Bianco to include silhouettes of 1-meter and 0.4-meter telescopes next to FTN.
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And of course, what would a AAS meeting be without giving away free swag? Earth stress balls with our logo displayed on the table in an empty filter wheel, M&Ms in LCOGT colors, and even several LCOGT t-shirts. We also held a raffle for 2 hours of 2-meter telescope time (on either FTN or FTS).
Several LCOGTers were in attendence including Federica Bianco, Melissa Graham, Avi Shporer, Andy Howell, Tim Brown, Dave Sand, BJ Fulton, Jerod Parrent, JD Armstrong, Rachel Ross, and Wayne Rosing.
Talks
- Federica presented the BOS and FTN lightcurves of SN 2011fe, as well as NIR data from UKIRT (provided by Myungshin Im, Seoul National University) at the SN 2011fe splinter meeting. BJ, Ben, and Andy also contributed to both the paper and talk.
- Melissa presented rates of core collapse supernovae (type II-P) in galaxy clusters with the MENeaCS (Multi-Epoch Nearby Cluster Survey) survey using data that spanned two years. Also presented were the ratio between Ia and II rates, the properties of the supernova host galaxies, and the implied star formation rate.
- Andy presented the lightcurves (griz) and spectra for two ultraluminous supernovae (type Ia) from the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS). The two supernovae are of the most luminous known and most distant with a spectrum.
- Dave presented the type Ia supernova rate from MENeaCS which included the find of 4 hostless, intracluster SN Ia which helped to constrain the intracluster stellar mass fraction to be ~15% as well as the delay time distribution of the supernovae to help identify the progenitors. (Dave would also like to be quoted as saying “BOOM.”)
- Avi presented a study on the the search for photometric orbital modulations in short-period Jupiter-mass transiting planets from Kepler. The modulations can include the beaming effect, tidal ellipsoidal distortion, and the reflection/heating of the companion and can be studied solely by photometry.
- Jerod participated in a special session on supernovae and talked about cataloguing the observed sub-type properties of type-Ia supernovae which is essential for understanding the underlying nature of their spectra. The recent discovery of the nearby type-Ia supernova SN 2011fe/PTF11kly offers a rare opportunity to study a spectroscopically ``normal'' sub-type in great detail.
Posters
- Tim presented a poster about the spectroscopic capabilities in the near future of LCOGT including FLOYDS (low resolution covering 330 nm - 1040 nm in one shot which uses 2 diffraction orders) and MRES (medium resolution fiber-fed cross-dispersed echelle which covers 380 nm - 850 nm). FLOYDS is aimed towards supernova classification and time-evolution studies while MRES is intended for the study of extrasolar planets as well as studies of pulsating and magnetically active stars.
- Federica presented a poster presenting the BOS and FTN lightcurves of SN2011fe, the youngest supernova (type Ia) ever discovered, found only hours after exlosion. She was also on a coauthor on aposter presenting the discovery of Light Echoes of Eta Carinae: a work which will come out on Nature in February, and which contains FTS data.
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Education
When some conference attendees asked if they could take a stress ball, we encouraged them to ask as a question in exchange. A few of those who did turned out to be educators (many of whom thought we simply did technology and science) who we then steered over to try out the various software being demoed. Many other researchers and educators who also stopped by were encouraged to check the software out. This included Agent Exoplanet, Star In A Box, Virtual Sky, the public observation archive, Space Book, and tours around the different areas of the website. Overall, everyone was quite impressed with the variety of resources, especially those entirely online, that are available. Many were also enthusiastic about our citizen science program which currently encompass doing all the photometry and light curve analysis of transiting exoplanets online with no software downloads (and eventually will be adding in the ability to observe on the network when time becomes available as well as extend into several other research topics).
Raffle winner
The winner of our 2 hours of 2-meter telescope time was Alyssa Mancini, an undergraduate at University of Scranton in Pennsylvania who is working on her BS in physics. Alyssa presented a poster entitled “The Size & Shape of the Mass Transfer Nozzle in Eccentric Interacting Binary Star Systems” at the AAS meeting and is excited to be getting some hands on experience in taking observations. Her interests include the evolution and formation of galaxies as well as gamma ray bursts and how they may contribute to the formation of other objects in the universe. Congratulations Alyssa!
This was a highly successful AAS conference for LCOGT. We were able to build up a stronger presence in the astronomical community and hopefully found many potential collaborators.
