As you may already know, I’m a professional astrophysicist, and for astrophysicists, the biggest event of the year is the biannual conference of the American Astronomical Society, usually known as the AAS (that’s “Double-A-S” for you non-astronomers). Now, the winter meeting held each January is really the main event, but the summer meeting being held this week is a pretty big deal, too. And that’s why, right now, I am in Austin, Texas for the 230th AAS meeting.
Well, partly it was a matter of when I had new results to present, but either way, it promises to be a fun week. I will be giving a short presentation (a 5-minute presentation–seriously) on my own research on Thursday, titled A Retrieval Architecture for JWST Observations of Directly Imaged Exoplanets, which I may talk about later. But there are lots of other cool new results coming for astronomers of all types.
Among the highlights of this year’s meeting (by which I mostly mean the plenary sessions) will be:
- Origins of Inner Solar Systems
- The Universe’s Most Extreme Star Forming Galaxies
- Our Future in Space
- Planet Nine From Outer Space
- Space Weather
This week, I will be blogging each day of the AAS with science highlights from the day’s talks—probably the main plenary sessions for the most part, but I’ll make note of any other interesting developments I see. If you’re interested in astronomy at all, it’s sure to be good, so stay tuned. Expect the first post tomorrow evening.
Science Meets Fiction 