High-energy astrophysics teleconference 8th February 2007 Files and links at http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~duncang/heat Present: Christine Chung & Duncan Galloway (UMelb); Aimee McNamara (USyd, visiting UMelb); Bryan Gaensler, Zdenka Kuncic & Stephen Ng (USyd) Apologies: Gavin Rowell, Shami Chatterjee, Ravi Sood & Stefan Dieters Newsy items: RXTE AO12 deadline passed on Jan 26th, could be the last one. Sbservations will cover 18 months from June 2007, no plans as yet for AO13 HST deadline has been re-scheduled due to the ACS anomaly to 2000 EST Friday Feb 9th 2007. Not too late to get your proposals in! See http://www.stsci.edu/hst/proposing/proposing/docs/late-breaking-news#acs for more. The Spitzer deadline for linked HST-Spitzer proposals has also been extended to Feb 16; see http://ssc.spitzer.caltech.edu/propkit/currentcp.html Chandra AO9 deadline is 1800 EDT, 15 March 2007; see http://cxc.harvard.edu/proposer/CfP. We plan a special HEAT session on March 1st to discuss Chandra proposal preparation etc; see below. The ANSTO Access to Major Research Facilities Programme (AMRFP) now lists Chandra as an Approved Facility. In principle funds are available to visit collaborators at CfA or MIT to prepare proposals and/or process data, although there are specific eligibility requirements to be met. Contact me (Duncan) for more details Sean Farrell, one of the founding members of HEAT, has submitted his thesis (we assume) and headed off to Toulouse, France, where he will be a postdoc at CESR. He can now be reached at sean.farrell 'at' cesr.fr X-ray data analysis workshop: call for input. As part of a Monash Fellowship, there is funding available to support biannual workshops dedicated to analysis of X-ray data from Chandra, XMM, RXTE, INTEGRAL etc. I plan to invite 2-3 overseas visitors to give presentations and help out during the hands-on sessions. Participants will be encouraged to bring their own datasets to work on. Please contact me (Duncan) if you have any ideas for content, requests, suggestions for presenters, offers to help, etc. etc. Science Welcoming Stephen Ng - Stephen has recently arrived in Sydney to take up a postdoctoral position working on pulsar wind nebulae and related science. He recently graduated from Stanford, under his advisor Roger Romani. - Alignment of spin axis (inferred from polarisation measurements) and (projected) proper motion can in principle constrain the SNe kick physics. 10-20 examples so far with alignment to within 10-20 degrees. - Alternative method to measure spin axis is via X-ray morphology, the axis of symmetry in toroidal nebulae like in the Crab likely also indicates the spin axis. Potentially can also get the full 3D spin vector via 3D modelling of the torus. Only a few example with both measurements, but all are in agreement - Duration of kick, pre-kick spin, and the alignment of spin with the neutron-star centre of mass all may be important. - Observed alignment used to determine constraints on the degree of neutrino anisotropy, indicating ~10% and a kick duration of 1-3 s. For more details see Stephen's recent paper on astro-ph, http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0702180, out soon! Next HEAT Thursday March 1st. Rosalba Perna visiting; topics will include Chandra proposals for the upcoming AO9 deadline.