PLANETARY SCIENCE:
Clues to Solar System Formation from Meteorite Composition - Frank Shu

Update on Solar System - Heidi Hammel

Solar System Formation - Doug Lin

Solar System Formation Simulations - Hal Levison

FINDING PLANETS:
Terrestrial Planet Finder Survey Project - Anne Kinney

Extra-Solar Planets - Geoff Marcy

Terrestrial Planet Finder Update - TRW

                                                       Lochkeed Martin

                                                       Boeing SVS

                                                       JPL-Ball

Transit Observations and Kepler Mission - Bill Borucki

Terrestrial Planet Finder Precursor:  A. Baglin:

NASA's Vision for the Future - Dan Goldin
 

STELLAR PHYSICS:
Modeling Black Holes and Gamma Ray Bursters  - Craig Wheeler

Update on Black Holes - Roger Blandford

Solar Activity - Craig DeForest

Studying Black Holes and Active Galactic Nuclei with X-Rays - Paul Nandra

Discs and Low Mass Stars - (Panel)

                Frequency of brown dwarfs as companions:

                Faint end of Stellar Luminosity Function: Jason Hargues (UOP):

                Classification of T Spectral Class Stars:  Adam Burgaser

COSMOLOGY:
Six Eras of the Universe - John Mather

Parameters of the Cosmic Background Radiation - Wayne Hu

Dark Matter Problems and Solutions - Donald Linden - Bell

Einstein's Blunder-Alex Filippenko

Super Nova Acceleration Probe  (SNAP)-UC Berkeley team -
Saul Perlmutter

Star Streams in Milky Way-Heather Morrison

Large Scale Structure       Gravitational lensing - Dudley Freutling

                                          Elipticity - Adrian Melott

                                           Photometry - Wayne Barkhouse

                                        Scott Croom: 2DF QSO Redshift Survey

                                        Mathew Colless: 2DFCAS, British/Australian
                                                                                    survey

                                         Leonid Malyshkin: Thermal conduction: Spitzer
                                                                                       cooling equations,

Peter Meszaros: Gamma ray bursts: origins and consequences:

Carl Gibson: Primordial Fog Particles (PFPs):

EDUCATIONAL TOPICS:

Mars Quest Project and Display - Cheri Morrow

NASA's Space Grant Program - William Hiscock

Community Outreach Through Introductory Projects - Daniel Fleisch

Opportunities for Participation in NASA Space Science  by  Jill Marshall

International Dark Sky Association  by  Elizabeth Alvarez de Castillo

Astronomy in Everyday Life by Chuck Stone

Kinesthetic Astronomy for "at risk" students:  by Cheri Morrow:

High School Courses for College:  Phil Sadler (Harvard

Copernican Myths: Professor David Danielson

Frank Shu-Meteorites/Solar System
     The chemistry, structure, and magnetic characteristics of meteorites
      seems to indicate that our Solar System formation is a result of a
      detached disk from the ancient Sun where materials were
      quickly and briefly heated swirling through solar flares.  This conforms
      to the T-Tauri disk/polar jet model of young active stars.
      Terran and Gas Giants cores formed at same time.  Perhaps took 100
      million years for Terran planets to accrete, whereas Gas Giants took
      only 10 million years once the process got started, since runaway with
      large masses in the "snow zone" of the Solar System (as opposed to the
      "rock zone".  Orbit time of inner planets vs. outer planets also is factor.
      Mars' growth was probably  stunted by Jupiter.  We are fairly certain that
      the gas giants contain rocky cores by calculating density based on
      mass based on gravity measurements by spacecraft that have flown by.

Craig Wheeler -Black Holes and Gamma Ray Bursters -
      Wheeler's idea is that when a massive star collapses in on itself,
      rather than the rebound supernova explosion due to literal rebound
      and/or flood of neutrinos, that the gravitational squeezing causes
      major increase in rotation rate of central compacting object, as skater
      pulls in arms.  This squeezing, as in a toothpaste tube, produces jets
      toward the poles, and the extreme dynamo and mechanics of rapid
      outflow are what cause the drastic explosion: Central collapse,
      rapid rotation, jets, explosion, disk extension.  Gamma Ray Bursters
      are probably just the view down the barrel of such an explosion.

John Mather-Future of Universe
      Professor Mather reviewed what we currently think we know about our
      Universe, including ideas of dark matter, quintessence, and the
      cosmological constant expanding the Universe.  The conclusion of what
      we know yields a scenario of six Eras over many billions of years:
      Primordial, Stelliferous (where we are now), Degenerate (dwarf stars
      left, ordinary matter decays), Black Hole (black holes and a few ordinary
      particles), Dark (dilute elementary particles and stable dark matter), and
      finally the Lonely, where there's not much left, and what's left is
      separated by essentially infinite distances.

Roger Blandford-Black holes
      Black holes exist beyond a reasonable doubt as we are able to measure
      masses and disk spins that closely match the models.  We need to
      investigate more about accretion, the various sizes of black holes
      observed, their relationship to galaxy formation and type of galaxy
      formed, and to use their extreme gravity to help us explore and
      verify relativity.

Solar Activy -Craig DeForest
      Our Solar probes have given us a detailed information of how the Sun
      works and the relationship of Solar activity to Earth.  There isn't any
      firm evidence of increasing solar flux at the moment, so global warming
      is a direct result of increased greenhouse gasses.  The corona still has
      some questions that are open but we believe that this is the source of
      the solar wind and the origin of much solar activity.  The shearing of
      the boundary of the radiative and convective layers of the Sun, due to
      differential rotation rates, appears to account for the disturbance of
      magnetic field lines which then cause solar flares.  The connection
      between flares and coronal mass ejections is still unknown.

Update on Solar System-Heidi Hammel
      The Eros flyby has been very successful, and NEAR will land on Eros
      on Valentine's Day.  Mars shows more geology of water flow.  Jupiter
       has colors we don't understand and we're still searching for water.
       Uranus is showing a distinct atmospheric change as it's other pole
      gains sunlight.  A correlation of orbital axis to eccentricity leads us
       to believe that Plutos are fairly common in the Kuiper Belt.

Cosmic background Radiation-Wayne Hu
      The power spectrum of the background radiation has shown us that
      current cosmological models are fairly correct and that our Universe
      appears to have a "flat" topography.  We see an "acoustical" peak that
      helps confirm early dark matter, and several other peaks that indicate
      composition and structure sizes in the early Universe.

Xrays from Black Holes and AGNs-Paul Nandra
      Xrays, with their short wavelengths, provide opportunities to probe
      much closer to Black Holes than optical radiation.  Data we are
      beginning to receive and analyze leads us to better understanding of
      the structure of black holes, although many mysteries remain, including
      the exact details of X-ray production.

Dark Matter-Donald Linden-Bell
      Dark matter continues to be a major mystery for astrophysicists and
      provides a wide variety of problems as well as solutions.  One alternative
      idea of missing mass is pristine white dwarfs, stars produced totally from
      hydrogen, and small enough to glow from gravitational energy but not
      fusion.  HST has detected several possible candidates.

Super Nova Search Project (SNAP)-UC Berkeley team-Perlmutter

Star Streams in Milky Way-Heather Morrison
      Streams of stars in our galaxy strongly hint that the Milky Way has
      gobbled up other galaxies over the eons, and that many bigger galaxies
      thus must be formed from smaller ones.

Terrestrial Planet Finder - four contractors

Einstein's Blunder-Alex Filippenko
      The upper right end of the Hubble Law graph, if it bends up or down,
      infers that our Universe may be decelerating or accelerating in its
      expansion.  Recent data, using Type 1a Supernovas as standard candles
      (thermonuclear detonations of white dwarfs due to instabilities, the
      brightest and most standardly illuminated objects we know of) in distant
      galaxies, shows that the supernovas are dimmer than expected when
      compared to the redshift of the host galaxy, thus the galaxy must be
      farther away and thus rushing away at increasing speed.  The ultimate
      conclusion is that eventually all galaxies will be separated by immense
      distances.

Copernican Myth-Danielson

Discs and Low mass stars-Panel

plus a score of poster papers and short presentations
covering everything from radio astronomy to gamma ray bursters.

SCIENCE EDUCATION SESSIONS

Hands On Universe workshop -
     provides data, software for students to perform real research.
 

DETAILS OF SESSIONS ATTENDED (See Synopses above)

AAPT SESSIONS

Magic in The Physics Classroom – Bob Friedhoffer and Marshall Ellenstein
These guys are great presenters and entertainers but did not present any useful teaching tips nor real science.  Hire them for your banquet entertainment!

Hands On Universe (HOU) – Sheron Snyder, John Kolena
HOU is run by UC Berkeley under NSF funding, and collaborates with Adler Planetarium.  HOU provides image processing software, images, and coordination amongst educators, to facilitate students’ use of digital data.  Community college/general University science are the primary user groups with the objective to overcome math/science “phobias” and to help students understand “how we know what we know about deep space”, similar to the FOPMO mission.
The project began as an offshoot of one of the Supernova Search professional projects, where the starfields were made available for student use.  Data is now available from a variety of Observatories, PMO may join this data supply base.  HOU needs FITS 16-bit format.  A global data base is on of the program goals.
Teaching Resource Agents (TRAs) are trained by HOU and sent into the field to conduct classes for teachers. Classes include basic astronomy, particularly use of locating devices like planispheres, as the user will need to know if the desired object is located high in the sky.
Observation requests are made through the internet, with a well formatted request form with the following parameters:
Reason for Request, BVR Filters desired, Number of Images, Number of Nights/Days, Take at (specific time), and Moon in Sky (Not applicable, Moon tolerable, or Dark Moon only options).
The analysis software is fairly user friendly but lacks many features:
No image enhancement tools, no RA/DEC direct readout capability (you need to manually do the plate scale conversion), no centroiding procedure,
no registration nor blinking tools,, no way to set a zero point for magnitude
calculations (only counts are read, need to translate manually from standard star).
The software/TRA services package sells for $250 per year that includes a teacher computer license and access to telescopes for data acquisition.  Additional site license costs $225 per computer.
We’ll check with these folks to see how we can collaborate.
They do have a wonderful animation of how a CCD acquires an image.
Sheron and John are both excellent instructors.  Sheron made an interesting analogy, comparing an H-R diagram as the Periodic Table of the Stars.
HOU’s web site is http://hou.lbl.gov
 

AAS INVITED LECTURES
Meteorites and Solar System Formation – Professor Frank Shu
Meteorites are fragments of the asteroid belt objects, formed from collisions, and sent our way by Jupiter’s gravity.  Most meteorites exhibit characteristics that can help us better understand the conditions and processes of our early solar system.  There are four curious properties of many meteorites:  They contain igneous types of compounds formed at high temperatures but only high for very short time, other compounds hydrated (containing water), uniform mixture indicating heated and mixed early on, and little evidence of radioactive isotopes.  One explanation would be a supernova or nova explosion relatively nearby to our Solar System and not too long ago, but this would have evaporated our Solar Nebula and injected other anomalies not observed.  Presence of Iron60 is evidence of supernova, though, so this theory isn't totally out.  However, an early active Sun may also have bombarded the Solar Nebula, but Al26 quantity observed would not have been produced that way.  The Calcium-Aluminum Inclusion (CAI) Chondrites may have formed early near our Sun, and then have been ejected outward, and this leads us to the following scenario:  The Solar System formation theory involves coalescing gas pockets, infall, disk formation.  Very short time.  Disk/outflow 100,000 years, finally stable star/disk 1,000,000  years T-Tauri stage.  Then planets formed.  Professor Shu's theory is that the Bi-Polar outflow stage is when planets and asteroids formed.  Rapid rotation (disk) created magnetic field with disk and star.  Magnetic field separated disk from star, funnels disk, pushes disk out, makes jets.  Forms truncated ring.  Solar cycles push and pull disk.  Meteoroids thrown out in cycles, heated as they are swirled by Sun, chondrites extremely heated in flares.  "droplets of fiery rain...flash heating".  This could be the natural heating mechanism for CAIs.  Paleomagnetism of chondrules also  is evidence of truncated disk where objects were produced as is partial loss of volatiles.  This active process may account for lack of some metals in planets, and presence of metal grains in chondrites as metals got swirled with other stuff in nebula.  Oxygen abundance/distribution in rocks may also point to the early dynamics.  Apparently there was overall isotopic uniformity, homogenization of gas, liquid, solids near Sun, with cool galactic stuff beyond.  80 percent of rock appears to be recycled material from near Sun (cores of giant planets, too).  If this theory is correct, we should find enhancement of rock/gas ratios in meteorites, and this implies maybe no sticking of planetesimals.  Like sand, no ice to glue together.  Instead, planetesimal formation by gravitation.  We should also find CAIs and chondrules in comets (melted stuff).  Philosophical idea: Geology is remote in time, Astronomy is remote in space.

Our data so far indicates five "eras" of our Universe:
PRIMORDIAL: 10 to minus 50th to 10 to 5th seconds: Big Bang, etc.
STELLIFEROUS:  10 to 5th to 10 to 14th seconds: end of H fuel, stars used up, Earth too hot to inhabit: greenhouse effect at 2x10 to 9th seconds, red giant problem at 5x10 to 9th seconds, then burnout.
DEGENERATE: Brown dwarfs, cold white dwarfs, 10 to 15th to 10 to 39th seconds after creation.  Only dwarf stars left, that don't radiate except when they infrequently collide and white dwarfs accrete dark matter.  Protons and neutrons decay, stars disappear as their constituent particles decay into radiation.
BLACK HOLE: 10 to 40th to 10 to 100th seconds: All that's left are black holes that radiate Hawking radiation, and a few elementary particles.
DARK ERA: 10 to 101st second and beyond: Dilute elementary particles, stable dark matter, some collisions may generate energy...we can't predict much about this era.
Theoretically, if expansion is correct, we'd then go to the
LONELY ERA, with acceleration exceeding speed of light, can't see anyone else!

Black Holes - Theory and Practice - Roger Blandford
Black holes are rather plain, they only have two characteristics or metrics.
Roy Kerr developed the Kerr Metric: the mass/length/time/energy parameter, essentially the mass of the object, plus the angular frequency, omega, the rate of rotation.  This rotation should (and does) create frame dragging. (We'll ignore the charge characteristic for the moment).
Black holes are surrounded by an event horizon (fortunately, the horizon cloaks the forbidden hidden singularity).  Such horizons would be about 10 km in diameter for a 10-solar-mass black hole, and 2 AU in diameter for a 100 million-solar-mass black hole.  We can compute these figures but alas we cannot directly observe any of this.  There is tremendous accretion power, however, the orbiting doomed gas, moving at .94 to very near the speed of light.  The rotation power that involves spinning magnetic fields that induce jets, generate about 10 to the 38th power watts from a typical stellar black hole.
We now believe that black holes exist, beyond a reasonable doubt, mostly because we've observed, per Kepler's Laws, the shifting of a star orbited by a black hole, which yields the mass and other dimensions of the dark companion.  Quasiperiodic oscillations (disk seismology so to speak), of 16 ms to 40 minutes (measured with Chandra telescope), give measure of spin and also indicate correctness of model, and indicate some variability of the system.  Active galactic nucleii (AGNs) and Quasars shine between 1 and 1000 typical galactic luminosities, and show 10 Mhz to 10 Thz continually rapid vibrations.  These measurements further confirm models but of course also raise more questions.  The lower power counterparts and the superluminal jets (up to 10c) also yield interesting results and raise the question of whether rotation or accretion provides the energy source?  X-ray spectroscopy is beginning to yield detailed information about rotation rates, and the radial acceleration allows measurement of mass.  We can conclude, due to high resolution observations of core motions, that most galaxies have black holes at their cores.  The Milky Way exhibits a "low demand, low supply situation", probably not a very massive black hole.

Several recent discoveries/topics include:
1. Detection of intermediate size black holes 30 to 10 to the 6th solar masses
in cores of some galaxies.  How do these lightweights relate to galaxy formation and evolution?  Is there a connection/similarity to white dwarfs and the Type 1 supernova situation?
2. Detection of rotation rates of black holes, and the accretion versus rotation power question?  Supply driven or demand limited?
3. Do black holes make elliptical galaxies?    Could a high density nucleus form early on, a large central black hole blow away gas before disk is formed?  Small central black holes, on the other hand, might allow for disk and spiral arms to form.
Future space based observations will increase our knowledge of black holes.  Earth based and space based gravity wave detectors will help us use black holes to test relativity, explore strong gravitational fields, accretion theories, and galaxy formation ideas.

Thought experiment:  reverse the expansion of the Universe,
time goes on, dense objects survive.   Structures formed shortly after Big Bang would not be in current baryon count implying dark matter and dark energy prevail.
Dark Matter Problems I: starts to behave poorly at certain accelerations and densities in models, too many baryons vs. dark matter, like in Coma Cluster?
Also cooling flow problems.
Dark Matter Problems II:  Where are the dark baryons, too many lensing events toward bulge of Milky Way.
Possible solution: pristine white dwarfs!  Directly out of hydrogen, never had fusion, would be excellent dark baryons.  Shine from degeneracy energy, the electron binding energy, fed by gravity.  The angular momentum of Hydrogen atom at lowest level is zero, the uncertainty momentum holds the Hydrogen electron "up".  Gravitational and electrical forces get equal and compaction occurs.
Do these types of objects exist, and how can they be formed?
HST has found some potential objects at 29th mag. in companion Deep Field images.  5 objects, 2 real movers.  2 arc sec per year.  Checking old plates for more.  Already finding 50 times more halo white dwarfs than previously accounted for.  Maybe we can find pristine white dwarfs, too.
Major problem is difficult to make in less than 10 to 12th years, and in sufficient number.  Good candidate but hard to create.
Equations that describe these objects indicate potential cooling instabilities, but the density profiles can be calculated.  Spheres, cylinders, and other shapes collapse at different rates.  Cooling is not caused by gravity, but by pressure and temperature.  Simulations show flattening.

Mars Quest: Cherri Morrow: $75,000 for exhibit, travelling exhibit run by SSI.  4500 square feet, 16 interactive displays, 2 videos, 5 computer stations including rover simulator, 1 high-definition theatre, 7 models.
SSI runs Electric Space, Mars Quest, Space Weather Center, Interactive Earth, Mars Quest Mini, and Origins displays, see astc.org.  Walk through displays, hands on displays, educators' guides and kits, museum staff orientation.  Funded from NASA's OSS, Mitsubishi, Hewlett Packard.  One goal is to interface: Research with Education, Earth Science with Space Science, Formal Education with Informal Education, and National Programs with Local Programs.  Exhibits can be updated "on the fly".  See Venn diagram at website or on CD given out.

NASA Space Grant:  William Hiscock, Montana State University:
Space Grants were legislated in 1988, sponsored by Senator Lloyd Bensen of Texas: Goals: service and outreach in education.  729 affiliates currently, with 19.1 million dollar budget from NASA and 42.8 million dollars in matching monies from States.  1998 participants included 385 schools of higher ed, 547 pre-college schools, 373 general public organizations, who serviced 38,000 higher ed, 563,000 pre-college, and 13,800,000 general public people.  Annual proposals are submitted for funding.
In Montana, we have: Astronomy resource web bases, Satellite Science Centers, an Observatory featuring CCDs and Starlab and 4WD vehicle and Planetarium with programs.  Our Mars Exploration Outreach was funded with $30K, half from Montana Space Grant, half from JPL.  Hourly wages and travel were paid, we outreached to 46,000 students with 100 student presenters.  We also did 5 workshops for teachers.  School districts also helped to pay.  We regrouped for Solar Program, where Lockheed Martin Marietta collaborated with us.  Timely real events in space seem to generate the most interest particularly with the younger students.

Community Outreach Through Introductory Astronomy Projects  by Daniel Fleisch;  This was done for a survey level astronomy class.  Benefits:
For University:  Enhanced public relations
                          Increased awareness of institution
                          Support of continuing ed.
For Students:    Exposure to world
                          Personal Contacts
                          Contribution to Community
For Community:  Pipeline to campus
                            Lifelong learning
Why is astronomy suitable for outreach?  Life's big questions dealt with, understandable and observable.  Broad range of levels, variety of support materials, leverage of high visibility, regularly accessible with special events.
Forms of outreach: Public sessions, articles, interviews, off-campus lectures, media commentary, new equipment/facilities publicity, student projects.
We required teams of students to spend 10 hours to develop school materials, give off campus lectures, operate radio telescope and conduct planet watch.  A successful project was scale model of the Solar System including "circle in Sun size", opening of solar diameter that contained models of planets, also a "hitchhikers' guide to the Solar System around town, with certificate issued to anyone completing the trip.

Opportunities for Participation in NASA Space Science  by  Jill Marshall:
IMAGE and AIS programs.  The space science enterprise requires educational component, see Morrow's Venn diagram for how the pieces interact.  Education is linked to systemic reform and collaborations between educational institutions and classrooms.  The education is standards based, on national science education standards and Project 2061 specs, including process standards.  POETRY concept (Public Outreach, Education, Teaching, and Reaching Youth).  IMAGE is educational component of auroral monitoring activity.  AIS offers access to digital data and analysis tools such as NEO finder and Triton monitor.  Jill wants Beta testers, particularly from schools.  E-mail her at marshall@cc.usu.edu, there isn't a web site yet.
 

International Dark Sky Association  by  Elizabeth Alvarez de Castillo:  NSF and membership funded.  Can be added to curriculum as hands on, inquiry based, interdisciplinary (science, lighting, environment, social, resource waste, etc.) activity.  Sense of ownership and involvement by students.  How does it effect me?  How do we raise awareness?
Activity in Universe in the Classroom, No 44, Fourth Quarter, 1998, by ASP:  Counting Stars/Faintest Stars Seen, 6-12 Pleiades.  Reducing light pollution:  Report on issues, solution.  What is "quality lighting"?  Evaluate effectiveness.  Question what is light needed for, how, best ways to light?
 

Astronomy in Everyday Life by Chuck Stone - One semester, no math.   Creative and educational project using collages, music, poems, art, quotes, videos and a playground planetarium.  One really slick idea he showed was a pipe mounted equatorial solar projection box, essentially a pinhole camera mounted to follow the Sun.
 

Star Streams in the Milky Way  - Heather Morrison
The "Spaghetti Collaboration", like the star streams.  10-20 Gyr simulation of small galaxy interacting with Milky Way shows the small galaxy getting torn apart.   Our Milky Way's halo is spherical and contains the oldest stars, thus can be a tracer of galactic history, but the question is were these stars formed in the halo or did they form in small galaxies which were accreted and disrupted to form halo?  So, how important was the process of accretion?  What will star streams tell us?
Early cosmological theory: independent evolution of ideas concerning structure formation:  "Bottom-up" theories: small objects form fast, later merge, versus "Big Tree Down" theories.  There are observational constraints: Hi z galaxies would be ideal to examine for data but due to distance are fuzzy.  Limitations from resolution and from surface brightness dimming make it tough to see details, of these objects, so let's look at the Milky Way where we can measure, view richness of detail in 3D, velocity, long dynamical effects over time (billion year frame).   Problem with Milky Way is that halo stars are rare, only 1 in 1000, and we view through the dense screen of the disc.  Early studies used small and biased samples.  There are only a handful of halo stars known.  Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy was discovered in 1994 through a serendipitous velocity study of the galactic bulge.  Found strip of stars with same velocity.  This dwarf is a low mass (1/100 of Milky Way) spherical dwarf, elongated to 34 degrees from center, and 45 degrees south of galactic plane, in elongated shape.  This galaxy is adding stars and globular star clusters to the Milky Way today.  How many other dwarfs have been swallowed?  The Eggen moving group was observed in 1959, NGP moving group in 1994, Solar Neighborhood Stream in 1999 included 9 stars.  Sloan DSS stream in 2000, 40-50 Kpc long, may be Sagitarrius debris?  We need to look for evidence of other streams.  One has been found near a globular cluster and there are three other studies going on.
Spaghetti group and survey plan: do many pencil-beam surveys in 100 square degrees of high galactic latitude, hoping to find 1 halo giant per ¼ degree FOV.  Accurate photometry but still not good enough.  We are fooled by foreground dwarf stars.  80 Kpc is most distant survey done, yielding 58 halo giants, many more than in the original 1936 study, but we want to find 100 times more.  Model shows nice stream but real data shows 37 of the 1000 shown in simulation, and shows spacial clumping but not total velocity.  We are looking for clustering in 4-space (3-D plus velocity).  Data shows confetti, no correlation of position/velocity.  When we tried to correlate pairs, recomputed, 58 giants put in, output showed significantly more close pairs of position and velocity.  One group of 4 stars match Sloan stream, second group 60 degrees away is probably from the Sagittarius galaxy too.  The stars of the outer halo appear to be mostly foreign stars, we don't know about stars of the inner halo.  So, what do the star streams tell us?  They constrain dynamical models of accretion, tell us about Milky Way potential, and give information about the dark halo, the Mass/Luminosity ratio of progenitor galaxy, and its chemistry.  All 4 Sagittarius stars appear to have low metalicity.
Summary:  Mounting evidence for satellite galaxy accretion onto large galaxies.  For the Milky Way, the Sagittarius galaxy is not the only galaxy accreted.  There appears to be agreement with the "bottom-up" scenario of galaxy evolution, as info will be available on history, dark matter, and progenitors.  There is some evidence of a faint ring of stars from the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Sagitarrius Dwarf.  Could there have been other mergers, like with galaxies smaller than the Large Magellanic cloud?  The thickness of the galactic disk may answer some of these questions.

Terrestrial Planet Finder survey: survey for habitable planets - Anne Kinney:
TPF survey is looking at 150 F, G, K class stars.  NASA's ORIGINS Program, hoping to find planets and clues to origins of life.

Geoff Marcy: Extra Solar Planets: We are now characterizing them, more than discovering them.  3 M/sec doppler shift sensitivity achieved yielding detection threshold of .1 AU to 100 AU, .1 to 3 Jupiter masses.  Jupiter's distance is boundary account its 10 year orbit, and the decade of data so far.
Marcy has done about 1000 stars, and Mayor has also done about 1000.
Non-sinusoidal data means eccentric orbit.  Most planets beyond their sun's tidal influence show eccentricity, but no trends yet.  Metalicity is higher in planet debris, not understood yet.  Disc is more efficient or do rich disks pollute the star?  Most planets are at lowest mass range of detectability, which is biggest evidence of existence of smaller planets.  Why the big planets are close to their stars is unknown, best guess is viscous accretion that forms gap that makes trap.  Eccentricity probably due to planet/planetessimal perturbations.  There's a prevalence now of multiple planets.  We observe a 4.6 day period peak.  When removed, this implies two Keplerians.  Most recently discovered M-type dwarf, Gliese 876 has indication of two planets orbiting, one with twice the period, hence a possible resonance, but may not be stable.  HD 168443 is strange, one planet is 7.7 Jmass with 58 day period, second is 17.2 Jmass with 4.8 year period, way too big planet, how could the disk coagulate such a large planet?  55 Cancri shows 14 day primary period with 12 year residual period, implying one Jupiter sized planet at Jupiter's distance.  Appears that 7 percent of stars have planets, mostly Jupiters in oval orbits, gravitationally perturbed, but 93 percent of stars don't have marauding Jupiters that would throw out smaller planets!  Best detection yet (lowest mass) is 12.8-Earth-mass planet.  SIM, TPF, and Keck are the best tools to find other Earths.  50 planets found so far, .3-5 Jmass range, short periods, eccentric orbits, multiple planets but no Solar System models yet found and no Jupiters yet.  Some of the data is difficult to construct models of, for instance there may be a single planet in eccentric orbit or multiple planets, some of which of course may not be detectable by this method.
 

Solar System Formation Simulations:  Hal Levison: www.boulder.swri.edu/~hal/talks.html
Are there terrestrial planets?  What is a planet?  Roughly spherical due to gravity.  "Uber" planets are terrestrial and gas giant and ice giant, "Unter" planets rocky and icy.  Characteristics of planetary systems:  Needed "kick start" in simulator!  No strong disk interactions observed.  In simulation, 60 percent of planets with mass of Jupiter spiral into the Sun, 2 planets left.  This system has billion year stability.  Terrestrial planets unlikely in systems that have eccentricity and instabilities.  If we start with model of many small planets, we don't get a solar system.  A system with a Jupiter and Saturn cuts the impacts on inner planets by order of 3.  Terrestrial planet formation and stability depends on eccentricity, not mass of giant planets.  The giant planets control the inner planets in many ways.

Transit Observations and Kepler Mission:  Bill Borucki  (Gibor Basri and Alan Gould): Mission is to find Earth-sized planets in habitable zones.  1 meter Schmidt camera with 105 Square Degree FOV, 42 CCDs, view 100,000 stars simultaneously, searching for evidence of transits.  Hope to find several hundred planets.  4-Sigma detection in 6.5 hours for 12th magnitude solar-like star.  Heliocentric orbits.  Four year search to spot repeat transits>2 to confirm, want to see 4 transits.  Photometric method really improves sensitivity, way below Doppler technique.  Scenario:  2 planets like Earth found by Doppler would imply Kepler photometry would find 50.  If 1.3 Earth masses at 1 AU, find 185, 2.2 Emass find 600!  1 in 50 chance if nothing found by Doppler.  If 1.0 Emass at .04 AU, 10,000 planets may be found.  If one percent of stars have 1.0 Emass at .04 AU, 100 planets found.  Should find 135 "hot Jupiters", densities measured for 35 and albedos measured for 100.

Terrestrial Planet Finder Precursor:  A. Baglin:
       French Corot Mission                             ESA's Eddington Mission
         Has spectrometer
           27 cm                                                                 75 cm
           2 deg                                                                  10 deg
     60,000  stars                                                        500,000 stars
          2.5  years                                                              3 years
      100 K earths/star type                                          100 G earths/star type
      Launch 2004                                                     Reserve 2006 Launch
 

Einstein's Blunder  by Alex Filippenko:
White dwarf type IA supernova explosion blows off .6 solar masses, glows for months due to isotope nuclear reactions continuing.  We use Type IA
supernovas exploding in galaxies of known distance as calibration tools to determine distance photometrically to unknown distance galaxies.
KAIT robotic telescope uses 25 second exposures, takes 1000 exposures per night, to Mag 19 objects.  Images are manually scanned for supernova candidates, found 20 in 1998 and 40 in 1999.  Follow up light curves are taken, the curves are correlated to known properties.  More luminous supernovas have slower changing light curves.  Light curves have to be corrected for atmospheric extinction and reddening.  There is a multi-color correction method that has yielded data that has adjusted the Hubble diagram by a factor of three, much less dispersion.  Farther supernovas seem to fall on the line set by the calibrated ones.  Two teams, led by Perlmutter and Schmidt are searching.  Search technique is to compare wide field images 3-4 weeks apart.  Supernova candidates are confirmed by spectra taken by VLT or Keck, 1 hour exposures.  Spectral features can also be used to correct the light curves.  Maximum of 18 objects done in one night.  Span very wide z range.  Done in batch mode.  HST used to follow up, particularly for objects in Mag 23-26 range.  Due to expansion of Universe, high z supernova light curves are stretched by up to factor of two.  This in itself is the best evidence of the acceleration of the expansion rate!  t=4 works well like t=2 works at z of 4.  There are 10 real good data points so far.  High z data points creep above standard universe model.  Omega(mass) minus Omega(lambda) to first order: Mass factor pulls, lambda factor pushes.  Distance of galaxy determined by supernova luminosity shows probability of what factor is stronger.  There is much probability why there's a non-zero lambda, but value is small.  Essentially zero probability now that lambda is zero.  Both teams are convinced that their data is OK, and the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation group has data that is complementary.  CMB and Supernova data combine to show probability 94 percent that Lambda is non-zero.  Energy density of Lambda is not dependent on mass of Universe, but nature of Space-Time.  Total Omega looks like it's near 1, implying age of Universe 14 GY plus/minus 2 GY, close to ages of stars in globular clusters, so this data is getting more consistent.  Objects at z = .5 provide lot of the evidence.
The current data from the supernova observations seems to indicate that there is some sort of "funny energy" at work in the Universe, perhaps a scalar field, a quintessence, which also results in a non-zero lambda.  What is even stranger is that this energy appears to be here today in great quantity but was absent billions of years ago.  Could this be a "vacuum energy" of the Universe?  The energy is 120 orders bigger than original observations showed.  Lambda now is thought to sit at .7, perhaps a small number, but almost certainly non-zero.  Follow-up results make the case even more strongly such as the power spectra from latest COBE data, that indicates  approximate 1 degree size fluctuations in the early Universe which is what is expected with parameters of vacuum energy.  "Dark energy" really isn't a good term, since this energy is not related to dark matter.  The current data that also indicates a flat Universe also matches the inflationary model.  The teams are still pursuing systematic uncertainties in the data:  Evolution of supernovas could be different than modeled, and there could be luminosity differences that we don't know about.  The MLCS calibration study indicates that these supernovas do behave very closely alike, closer than oranges and tangerines.  This study searched for observational differences in age groups of supernovas.  Those who might argue that for a high z, the supernovas should be intrinsically dimmer, the curve should be different, but it isn't.  Beyond z=1, matter dominated.  We would expect turnover in curve from z=.5.  What about the extinction problem?  Is dust in the way?  The MLCS calibration corrects for distance.  There might be a color excess if model has various lambda values, but again, the residuals should turn curve down at very high z as dust factor would change.  We still need to continue and make many more surveys and calibrations.  Equation of state is uncertain.  How is Omega related to z?  SNAP will check on some of these things.

Kinesthetic Astronomy for "at risk" students:  by Cheri Morrow:
Kinesthetic activities provide the sensation of body position, motions and senses.  "Sky Time" lesson for 6th graders to adults:  participants are Earths, with Mount Nose.  There is a "learning cycle": Discussion of prior knowledge, implement activity, reflect on activity, application to new learning situation.  Use the activity to: Relate factors that create Earth's climate to those that create Mars' climate, and to  Go to your birthday.

Terrestrial Planet Finder Configurations:
Ed Wright: TRW: We need to observe out to 50 parsecs to examine 150 reasonable candidate stars.  The factors of making good observations turned out to be much greater than expected.  Searching a uniform distribution over the entire sky is one problem, as is, for IR, zodiacal light.  TRW has proposed five classes of instruments:   30 meter large aperture coronograph, 200 meter focal length Fresnel coronograph,  a "sparse aperture" 100 meter
disk of reflectors, a 75 meter baseline monolith nulling interferometer, and a  free flying formation of nulling interferometers.  This flying device would use an occulter concept, a 100,000 KM blocker, 70 meters wide.  25,000 second long exposures would work well.  This would only be for visible light, not IR, as cannot cool sufficiently.  The Phase II part of the project would look at configurations for large scale IR coronographs.
Lockheed-Martin: Science goals: Should study real Jupiter and Saturn to learn about Earth.  Spectral goals: Millimeter, and mid-IR are worse for goals.  Devices: IR nulling interferometer with coronograph that would also handle visible light and 1 micron signals.  Coronograph has potential problems.  We'd go with mid-IR nuller that has 100 picometer surface precision.  Larger aperture means longer telescope whereas with interferometer, is inverse relationship.  Connected or free flying configuration would be dictated by instrumentation.  There should be a precursor mission designed, built, and tested as a pilot program.  Our TPF would cost about 1 billion dollars, the pilot program would cost about 750 million dollars, and could be done in one year.
Steve Ridgeway: Boeing/SUS:  We are rethinking our plans.  We want to derive the performance requirements, provide true imaging, tailored aperture, extended mission, and a precursor.  We want to study new architectures such as apodized square apertures, hyper telescopes, and laser trapped mirrors.  For a design called the Snapshot  Hypertelescope with 4+ designs, we've selected two.  These may eliminate need for nulling, and makes coronograph simple to build for IR and visible spectra.  3-meter class instrument could observe planet 4-6 parsecs from Earth.  There are also ideas for 10 and 30 meter class instruments.  A hyper telescope with pupil densification for coronography, with dilute array, or a rotational synthesis imager made from 6 two meter telescopes tethered are some of the tentative plans that we have.
Steve Kilston: JPL-Ball: To accomplish planet-finding and characterization, we believe that observing in the F, G, and K IR bands is important.  Also of importance is to reduce starlight leakage in the system, to provide technology readiness and reliability, and to keep costs down.  Using IR reduces brightness of incoming starlight but we need to consider spacial displacement of the planet in the visible light band..  A visible band coronograph may work fine, we'll have to experiment.  Alternatively, an IR interferometer may also do, there's no decision yet.  The Spergel double-hole pupil forms an "x" shaped image that cuts starlight well.  We'd use 3000-100,000 second exposures, which make big difference in what you could see.  An Earth at 20 parsecs may show in a 1 hour exposure.  Visible light spectrometry might show Oxygen and Water.  IR shows Carbon Dioxide but is Carbon Dioxide really as good a biomarker as other chemicals?  We need milliarcsec resolutions, and capability to see down to 35th magnitude minimum to observe inner habitable zones on another Earth.

Large scale structure:
Dudley Freutling:  We can observe weak gravitational lensing on scales less than 1 arcminute with HST, viewed as aligned along gravitational fields due to weak lensing.  One problem is galaxies are hidden behind one another in these images.  The shear of the geometrical space reflects cosmological features.  Large numbers of galaxies show in each field.  This helps overcome statistical effects, and are good quality data.  Ground-based 8-meter class instruments are too small.  We need to observe at less than 1 arcmin resolution to see the shear and the shapes.  HST images of 2000 second integration times contain about 20 useful galaxies.
Adrian Melott: The non-zero Lambda/Cold Dark Matter model implies clusters of galaxies grouped.  Within clusters, elipticity should align most recent merger actions.  The jet winds from galaxies correlate also with longest action of supercluster.  Clusters have fundamental planes.  A galaxy 10-20 MPC from its neighbor should be spherically relaxed and in a higher gas density cluster.  More information will be presented at a June 6th Special Session in Pasadena.
Wayne Barkhouse: Photometric properties of low z galaxy clusters:  Observed change in luminosity function over distance/time shows evolution.  Apparently, dwarf galaxies form the halo for the large CD class galaxies.  Are dwarf spheroidal galaxies tidally disrupted to form halo?  Background galaxies need to be subtracted from control fields and also the color criterion obtained to study the background.  We need to separate the types of clusters.  Either one or two Schecter functions fit distribution curves of dwarfs/giants.  Nobody knows why.  We are beginning to investigate the halo structure and halo loss and distribution curves of the CD galaxies.
Scott Croom: 2DF QSO Redshift Survey: searched for QSOs 18.25-20.85 mag, took 32726 spectra, found fairly homogeneous distribution to z~3.  Correlations to various cosmological functions with Lamda at .7 fit well.
Clustering seems similar to local galaxies and is constant with respect to redshift.
Mathew Colless: 2DFCAS, British/Australian survey: 2000 square degrees, 19.45 mag, 250,000 galaxies around NGP, SGP, and random strips.  Hot and Cold Dark Matter theory matches their data, including their baryon number estimate.  Omega(m)=.3, h=.7, Omega(b)=.04.  They feel they have made the most accurate measurements of red-shift space.
Leonid Malyshkin: Thermal conduction: Spitzer cooling equations, important to explain structure.  Cooling time is related to cluster formation.  Electrons travel along field lines, motion influenced by mirror strengths, may be distorted and have tangled field lines.  Electrons bounce between core and boundary.  Thermal conduction to tangled field lines can be analyzed.  Conductivity reduced because of magnetic mirrors (Spitzer) and tangling.  1/2000 in halo, 1/200 in core.  Sensitive to field decorrelation lengths.  Much still unknown.
 

Peter Meszaros: Gamma ray bursts: origins and consequences: These are the most distant and most energetic explosions in nature.  1991 BATSE/Compton data started to show us 10-100 second to millisecond variability, non-thermal spectra, GEV energy levels that were not blackbody shaped.  One to two second bursts typical with two or three peaks.  Isotropic distribution  implies cosmological distances, approx z = 4-5.  Solar rest mass energy and beaming.  Frequency: 1 per day or 1 per million years per galaxy, therefore much rarer than supernovas.  Greater luminosity than the Sun for 10 to the 10th years, or the Luminosity of an entire galaxy for 1 year.
Possible explanations:  Mergers of two neutron stars, or neutron star and black hole, or hypernovas.  Hypernovas are dense stars, energy from the torus and/or the rest mass, but how is the energy and specifically the gamma rays extracted?  Neutrino annihilation or electromagnetic torques are primary sources, like in AGNs.  How to get Gamma rays?  Narrow high energy jets would degrade to fireball, but relativistic expansion plus external and internal shocks in the jet stream could generate the rays.  Afterglow follows laws of radiation decay, the X-ray afterglow was discovered in 1998.  Very little variation with respect to distance.  Seem to be in star-forming bluish galaxies.  Characteristics determined from light curves, and some features like humps not explained.  External or local effects?  Relativistic reverse shocks (Lawrence factor?) observed, but unknown what is really going on.  The X-ray spectral lines in the afterglow have now been observed indicating possible shell formation structure, but is emission, not absorption spectrum.  Perhaps a funnel is formed.  Conclusions:  17 GEV highest discovered to date, lasted about 120 seconds.  Ultra high energy source of cosmic rays, neutrinos, and probably gravitational waves.  More spacecraft are collecting data.  One other interesting speculation is that one third of the light coming from cosmological distances is generated by GRB/Black Hole type objects.

High School Courses for College:  Phil Sadler (Harvard):  Why is learning science so hard?  He used to sell  planetariums and computers, found that the key is listening: for students to ask good questions and then listen.   Students have prior beliefs which are very hard to change.  Conflicting ideas can exist together in the students' minds.  Factual knowledge is up, but conceptual knowledge is down in one year after learning.  This can make students more confident in their misconceptions.  We need to provide contradictory evidence.  A survey of students indicates that taking High School Physics didn't influence college grades significantly.  Distribution is identical with 25 percent variation.  This implies obvious demographic factors.  Student views on reasons for success:  The High School GPA and taking High School Physics raise University Physics grades a lot, and math is more important.  Reasons given by teachers are very similar, plus students who learned fewer topics but in more depth did best.  Survey courses did worst.  If teacher could explain problems in several ways, the students did better.  Students who did not have textbooks did better.   If textbook drives the course, there's too much to cover.  More labs made grades worse.  To repeat labs is the solution.  Mechanics and other basics are good, and there's need to do quantitative problems.  Discussing demos after the demo hurt grades, should be done before the demo, and predictions made.  Not using textbook is good, and skipping around in book is good.  Procedures that led to lowest grades were: friendly teachers, too much content coverage, too many labs, too much reading, doing qualitative not quantitative problems, and doing discussions after demos.  Procedures that are insignificant include: amount of freedom, projects, homework, demos, problems, ratio of student to teacher talk time, and characteristics of teacher.  Searching for Conceptual Mastery  by Bloom,  indicates that knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and judgment are the steps needed, ie the "old slow way".  Final advice to High School teachers: avoid survey courses, carefully select limited concepts for students to learn, use a variety of different methods to teach, watch out for student preconceptions, and  use study groups and build on skills like teamwork.  Also, be sure students take plenty of math, including calculus.  Wait 15 seconds after posing questions, to let students think about good answers.  Note that correlational studies cannot prove anything and that educators are looking at new theories.

Copernican Myths: Professor Danielson:  The speaker is the janitor sweeping away myth (like men in black against scum of the Universe).  1. 500 years ago everyone thought that the Earth was flat.  2. Most of us still think we are the center of the Universe.  The first myth is easy to dispose of, but the second one is much more difficult.  That Copernicus "dethroned Earth from the center of the Universe" is a common claim, but is really a false cliche.  Geocentrism equates with anthropocentrism.  Earth was not in the center of the Universe to start with and therefore Copernicus did not move it.  Ptolemy did think that Earth stood in the center and the heaviness of Earth led to idea of geocentrism, but this was an orientation, like the "low point" or the "filth" below, but not the center.  Sun in lowest place this in middle (?).  Heliocentrism, Copernicus, and Galileo put humankind upward, Ptolemy had Earth downward.  Geocentrism: Kepler reconceptualism: We are center of orbits, some outside, some inside.  Earth is the optimally placed orbiting space station.  Bewilderment maybe drove the misquote of Copernicus.  We are special because we have shown we are not special.  Let's do accurate historical astronomy.  Otherwise it can misrepresent ancient world view and deemphasizes our importance.

Disks and Low mass stars:
Frequency of brown dwarfs as companions: J. E. Gizis:  2MASS survey just found double brown dwarfs.  BDs are common by themselves, now we think 20 percent are double.  Separated by 1-10 AU, none found wider.  So far, equal masses.  Very few brown dwarfs found orbiting "regular" stars.  About 1.5 percent of stars have "wide companion", possibly captured (at what distance?), reasons still unknown.  We may not be able to detect a brown dwarf orbiting our Sun at 1000 AU.  We have good data on age and metalicity of brown dwarfs there.  This sets constraints on present rate of formation and population size.  There aren't any known brown dwarfs in the Hyades cluster, we wish there were some so that we could calibrate their properties since the distance to the Hyades is fairly well known.  To search for them, we use reference/model of pixel history.  All pixels are analyzed and compared.  This system rejects glitches well.   4 possible candidates were found, further spectal analysis rejected two, and the other two were too faint, probably background stars.

Faint end of Stellar Luminosity Function: Jason Harlow (UOP):
Type M dwarfs: Mass density issue, influences mass density of entire galaxy, and specifically, density of galactic disk.  There is a lot of uncertainty in the number of nearby stars and the disk population and density of the Milky Way.  The population of many more faint than bright stars compounds the research efforts.  Dwarf density: M dwarfs may be 60 percent of the disk?  Palomar 20-second integrations taking strips in I and R bands, using color index/distance modulus, and spectra, have found a few more dwarfs, in M, N, L, and T classifications.

Classification of T Spectral Class Stars:  Adam Burgasser:
T dwarf stars have methane that shows in five spectral bands.  These are real dwarf stars, blue in color, and seem to be near the galactic plane.  About 30 have been discovered so far.  Sloan and 2MASS surveys should find more.  Absorption band in IR is easy to detect.  There may be more going on with these stars than we currently detect.  Radii appear fairly constant, so temperatures must vary quite a bit.  Around 750 degrees Kelvin, not linear correlation to spectral type.  Why not is unknown.  L Dwarfs have dust that reheats atmosphere.  T Dwarfs had dust settling out and cooling their photospheres, but luminosities stay up.  Water and methane reduction high in atmosphere of T dwarfs, causing production of finding wide range of temperatures.  Mass is constrained by height of water band in spectrum.  If observed with large aperture, a Calcium doublet shows up that is broadened.  There may be some cooler stars yet to be found.  There may be a T-dwarf binary just found.

Cosmology:  Carl Gibson: Primordial Fog Particles (PFPs):
Gibson proposes an unorthodox explanation of the baryonic dark matter in galaxies by posing that huge amounts of Uranus-sized clumps of hydrogen and helium, (PFPs) were formed due to turbulence just after the Big Bang and now hang around as icy globs.  He uses the latest COBE/BOOMERANG data to back up his claims, and also refers to possible optical sightings in various nebulas, since these particles would show up if they are heated and their gasses blown around.  See http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~ir118 for the details and various viewgraphs.
 

POSTER PAPERS

Point-spread function used in images to determine which objects ae stars and which are galaxies.  Software called S-Extractor designed to do this.  Need 2 arcsec or better seeing to make it all work reliably.
 

Planetary Nebulas: only about 1 percent are spherical.  Using photometry and assuming comparable luminosities, distances to Planetary Nebulas are being determined, and then Planetary Nebulas are also being used as standard candles to help determine distances to galaxies.

Within the "irregular galaxy", M82, there is evidence from Nobeyama Millimeter Array and from Chandra, that there is a massive superbubble of hot gas created perhaps from the formation of 2 black holes in the center of the galaxy.  10 to the 3rd or 4th  stars went supernova to create this bubble.

Galaxy M51 appears to be a Seyfert Type 2 galaxy, low luminosity with a radio lobe and a jet 3" southward from the nucleus.  Change in brightness and distortions of the lobe and jet have been observed.  The cause may be starbursts.

HST:  Fine guidance sensors guide to 1 milliarcsec precision by using interferometry.

Trying to detect planets orbiting galactic bulge stars: Searching for microlensing transits.  10 meter scope over 10 nights.  More stars to search as much denser population.

Planetary search: North Georgia State University, Joseph Jones, jjones@ngcsu.edu.  Trying binary star systems.  Working with D. B. Caton at Appalachian State U.

Pari (Pisgah) Radio and Visual Observatory, J. D. Cline, in North Carolina offers data acquistion for students and is interested in what we do.

Galaxy M33 might have a dark companion galaxy, as evidenced by distortions in M33.

Radio Telescopes:  Andrew Young, U Minn:  How do radio telescopes work to create a digital image? (my question to him)  A: Photons create waves which have phase and amplitude.  Signal is fed through equivalent of 2-slit screen to form interferometry pattern.  A Fourier transformation is calculated to yield a power spectrum.  This yields spacial data, which through another transform yields RA and DEC of a point source signal.  There are also side-lobes, which are subtracted.  The point sources are built up to create the image.  Phase information is checked against a calibrator.  I do not understand this at all yet.