I’ve spent the better part of this week in Seattle at the American Astronomical Society Conference in Seattle, so I decided to write a post about some of the highlights.
I got to attend lots of great talks at the meeting. Here are some summaries:
- “Cassini Eyes the Rings of Saturn“, a talk given by Carolyn Porco, discussed some recent discoveries by the Cassini spacecraft, which is orbiting Saturn. Little moons embedded in Saturn’s rings can actually clear spaces in the rings (360-degree gaps or partial gaps). This is the first time moons have been tracked while inside disks. It is believed that ~100 large bodies are currently in orbit inside Saturn’s A ring.
- “Chandra’s First Decade of Discovery”, given by Harvey Tananbaum, talked about some important findings made by the space based Chandra X-Ray Observatory since it started operating.
- The session “Super Earths and Terrestrial Planets” contained several mini talks about recent discoveries by the Kepler space-based telescope. In a talk given by William Borucki, it was announced that Kepler has recently discovered its first confirmed rocky planet! The planet, Kepler-10b, has a radius 1.42 times that of Earth, and has a temperature of 1833 K.
Panel about Kepler-10b from the Kepler booth at AAS
- “The First Supermassive Black Holes”, given by Mitchell Begelman, was dedicated to discussing two different schools of thought about supermassive black hole formation. One theory is that they formed from Population III stars. The alternate theory discussed was that they formed from the direct collapse of gas clouds.
- My favorite talk was “New Science with Old Stars” given by Anna Frebel, this year’s recipient of the Annie Jump Cannon Award. Anna Frebel does high resolution spectroscopy, and she has discovered the oldest known star, and the most metal-poor star. She researches these extremely old stars to try to answer questions about the formation of our galaxy. Metal poor stars, having formed before the universe was significantly enriched with metals by supernovae, can help us put together the history of our galaxy’s formation and aid us in understanding the origin and evolution of chemical elements. The metallicity of a star is defined as its iron to hydrogen ratio. The most metal poor star has an iron to hydrogen ratio that is 1/250,000 that of the sun. The oldest known star is dated at around 13 billion years.
While in Seattle, I also got to do some sightseeing, which was exciting since I’ve never been there. My friends and I went up to the top of the Space Needle, but it was so windy that we couldn’t stay out very long. We could even feel the building swaying back and forth. Apparently it sways about an inch for every 10 mph of wind.
The Space Needle
The poster sessions where people display their work on posters are also a lot of fun to go to. Various organizations, telescopes, and companies have booths at the poster sessions, and some are pretty elaborate. They also give away wall posters, pens, pamphlets, and things like that, so now I can cover my wall with posters of galaxies and stars. Overall, I had a great time in Seattle; I learned a lot and got to see a lot of great talks and posters. I can’t wait for next year’s AAS!
From a display at AAS
