American Astronomical Society division will hold national meeting at CU

By David Brand

The American Astronomical Society will hold the 34th national meeting of its Division on Dynamical Astronomy at the Statler Hotel Amphitheater at Cornell, May 4 to 7. About 100 specialists in the dynamics of the universe are scheduled to attend.

The study of the dynamical universe encompasses the way stars move in their orbits, planetary rings generate waves, asteroids are tidally torn apart and galaxies collide and merge. Because astronomers rarely have the opportunity to run experiments with the objects they study, from irregular moons to galaxies, they use computer simulations to model the universe. And because it often takes millions or billions of years for stars or galaxies to move along their orbits, astronomers use the computer as a time machine, compressing a billion years into minutes to watch how the universe evolved.

This will be the first time the division has held its meeting at Cornell, although there is a long tradition of dynamical astronomy at Cornell, going back to the 1960s when Thomas Gold, professor emeritus of astronomy, was chair of the Department of Astronomy. Two years ago Joseph Burns, the Irving Porter Church Professor of Engineering and professor of astronomy, chaired the national group, and next year's chair will be Cornell astronomy Professor Philip Nicholson. Burns is hosting the Cornell meeting, which will hear talks from some of the world's leading astronomical researchers.

Among the invited speakers will be Saul A. Teukolsky, the Hans A. Bethe Professor in Physics and Astrophysics at Cornell, who will discuss numerical simulations of black holes. Einstein's equations of general relativity are extremely complicated and difficult to solve, but recently great progress has been made in trying to solve these equations numerically using supercomputers, Teukolsky says. Problems involving black holes are particularly challenging and he will describe the results of recent calculations of black hole collisions, and relate the results to the current observational search for gravitational waves.

Other speakers, on subjects ranging from asteroids to time coordinates, will include James Binney of the University of Oxford, Steve Ostro and Myles Standish of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Derek Richardson of the University of Maryland, Byron Tapley and John Ries of the University of Texas, and Mark Morris of the University of California-Los Angeles.

Also presenting papers will be three of Burns' graduate students, Valerio Carruba, Matija Cuk and Ishan Sharma. For more information on the meeting, go to http://dda.harvard.edu/meetings/2003.