HEAT: High-energy Astrophysics Teleconference

This week's HEAT presents Chryssa Kouveliotou who is visiting CAASTRO from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center for a few weeks. Chryssa will talk about some of her work on a newly-discovered magnetar, Swift J1834.9-0846 and describe the multi-satellite observations of the source. An asymmetric region around the source extending between 50" to 150" from the center, detected in pre- and post-outburst data, is claimed to be a magnetar wind nebula (Younes et al. 2012).

Agenda:

The first of a (hopefully) new and revitalised series of high-energy (and gravitational wave!) astrophysics teleconferences took place today, with approximately 20 attendees from seven locations across the country. James Miller Jones (ICRAR, Curtin U.) gave a very nice report on their recent result finding evidence for two stellar-mass black holes in the globular cluster M22 (1.3 MB PDF; ref. Strader et al. 2012, Nature 490, 71). Enthusiastic discussion followed, with Geoff Bicknell (RSAA) contributing his recent COSPAR talk on Connections between radio and high-energy emission in AGN.
Sean Farrell (USyd) followed up with a report on two of the conferences which took place this year celebrating the 50^th anniversary of X-ray astronomy — one largely looking backward and the other forward.

Next week (22^nd October) I plan to resume the High-Energy Astrophysics Telecons (HEAT) that last took place back in 2009. These ~monthly telecons brought together people within the Australian community with an interest in high-energy astrophysics to discuss new science results of common interest. If you would like to take part, please visit the Doodle poll and indicate your preferred timeslot, taking note of the time zone where applicable:

http://doodle.com/uh68tdm7iwvvyzf2

As well as providing an opportunity to introduce ourselves, for those new additions to the community, I would also like to invite suggestions for presentations. If you have a recent exciting result of broad interest, and can put together a few slides to talk about over 15-20 min of the telecon, please let me know and i'll book you in.

Click for HEAT 2006—09