 All right, welcome to the January webinar of the NASA night sky network this month We welcome Rick Feinberg to our webinar who share with us some of the latest discoveries as announced at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society Rick Feinberg is in his 10th year as press officer of the American Astronomical Society from 1986 to 2008 he served in a variety of editorial and management positions at Sky and Telescope magazine Including eight years as editor-in-chief He earned his bachelor's degree in physics at Rice University and his master's in doctorate in astronomy at Harvard University Though trained as a professional astronomer Rick remains an amateur at heart Observing the sky and taking astrophotos from his private observatory in central New Hampshire and in veteran travel Often in pursuit of total solar eclipses Rick has visited all seven continents and the north and south poles So please walk on Rick Feinberg Thank you very much Brian Vivian Dave. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with everybody this evening I'm going to share my screen. So give me just a second and With any luck, you'll be able to see my PowerPoint slides All right. Well, hopefully it looks great. You can see my slides. Great. That's good to know. Okay, so I'm Fresh back from Seattle, Washington Every January the American Astronomical Society has The bigger of its two annual meetings. We have a smaller meeting in the summertime But the winter meeting is big and my predecessor Steve Marin who was double AS press officer for Almost a quarter of a century He coined the term Super Bowl of Astronomy to describe our winter meeting now in those days the Super Bowl was actually played in January, but now with with the football schedule having been extended a bit the Super Bowl has Uched its way into early February So I hope you'll give us a little artistic license to continue to call our January meeting the Super Bowl of Astronomy We call it that because it's generally the biggest astronomy meeting of the entire year worldwide the only meeting of professional astronomers that ever exceeds a winter double AS meeting is the International Astronomical Union General Assembly, which involves astronomers from the entire planet That occurs only every three years. So most years we are by far the biggest astronomy meeting of the year and the double AS itself As I've kind of intimated is the professional society of astronomers It's mostly us though. We also have a fair number of Canadian members. We have some Mexican members and several hundred international members as well So it's not just North America All right, so let me tell you a little bit about what the meeting entails I'm not just going to tell you some science highlights. I'm going to give you a little flavor in the meeting Let's see if I can advance my slides that There we go. Okay so It's a big meeting as you can see this is a photograph from a plenary session where most of the in this case 3,200 attendees come together and hear presentations from prominent speakers Sometimes they're prize winners. Sometimes they're just people who have done especially Fascinating and interesting research If you've been keeping up with the news, you'll recognize that the photo in the background there on the slide is Oh mua mua the interstellar visitor. I'll say a little bit more about that later So people come in and they get badged up and then they can spend the next four days attending the meeting It's more than just science. It's it's social events too It's an opportunity for people to get together with old friends to make new friends To meet with colleagues As you can see at this table at one of the receptions, we get a lot a lot of young people our winter meeting is Very strongly represented by students. We have hundreds of undergraduates hundreds of graduate students at the meeting Most people who are getting their PhD During the current year will give a thesis presentation at the January meeting We have upwards of a hundred of those each year So it's quite dynamic There's an event where undergraduates can come learn about graduate programs in astronomy Which is always very popular because most astronomers of course are eager to Go all the way through to a PhD a doctorate And so one of the main reasons the undergraduates like to come to the meeting It's not just to present whatever research they might have done but also a chance to meet with representatives from all the graduate programs and Almost every graduate program in North America is represented at this Event that we have tonight before the meeting gets officially underway with science talks We have workshops professional development skill building here's a workshop where people are learning to Access scientific databases online and do visualizations with the worldwide telescope Data system, it's a kind of a high-powered Desktop planetarium that not only shows you what the sky looks like but gives you access to the underlying data From spacecraft ground-based observatories and so on so lots of workshops occur on the weekend before the meeting begins We also have policy discussions, so for example, you may have heard that astronomers are gearing up for the Decadal survey. This is an exercise that is sponsored by the National Academies of Science and we We the community comes together and discusses You know, what are the biggest scientific questions for the coming decade and what ground-based and space-based instrumentation? Do we need new telescopes new space missions? Etc to be able to answer these questions or at least make significant progress in them so the upcoming decadal surveys called Astro 2020 the two chairs are in the lower right photograph Fiona Harrison from Caltech and I'm blanking on his name. Oh, no, it's Robert Kinnick cut I think he's from University of Wisconsin and also Texas A&M They're the co-chairs of the survey. They were just named by the National Academies a couple of weeks ago and so they came to the meeting to Give everybody a preview of how the process is going to work We get all sorts of famous people at our meetings You guys probably don't recognize this famous person But if you're an astronomer, you know that it's David Silva who runs the National Optical Astronomy Observatory I wonder if more of you will recognize this famous person Since I can't hear you all I don't know how many of you are chatting at the moment and saying oh I know who that is, but that's Apollo 17 moonwalker Jack Schmidt Who's on a NASA advisory panel? But now he's not a NASA employee anymore If he had been he probably wouldn't have come to the meeting because of the shutdown But because he's not he was able to come And solicit feedback on various NASA programs because as I said he's on one of NASA's advisory committees We always like to have some kind of local impact when we go to a city We travel around the country our meetings are never in the same place twice at least not twice in a row So one of the things we do is we bring local school kids in give them a Lecture by a prominent astronomer who does something that they can relate to such as exoplanet research or Studying black holes or something else that kids have heard of in this case It was Emily Lavec who's at the University of Washington So she was local and obviously was going to be at the meeting so she gave a talk to the kids They're mostly middle school and high school and then we turn the kids loose in the exhibit hall where they get to interact with real astronomers and Learn about Instrumentation forthcoming space missions and so on so here on the upper left. They're learning about the James Webb Space Telescope With a scale model there and on the right. They're learning about the electromagnetic spectrum and how Light consists of many different wavelengths many different colors and that it goes beyond the visible spectrum into the radio, which is where The booth that they're at now is the National Radio Astronomy Observatory surveys Tell us that the single well the single most important reason people come to the meeting is to share science but the second most popular reason they come is to meet with their colleagues and Discuss possible collaborations make progress on joint research projects and so on So there's lots and lots of time in the schedule where people are just hanging out talking with each other and so Even even though there's now technology available to make it possible to have virtual meetings like we're kind of doing right now People tell us they they don't want us to have virtual double AS meetings They want to come and meet people in person and have this opportunity to have an exchange of ideas But as I said the number one reason is the science so at a meeting the size of the one in Seattle where we had more than 3,000 participants and that's Not and that's already accounting for the fact that we lost a couple hundred because of the shutdown We had more than 2,000 science presentations Some of them are lectures The plenary lectures as I said are from prominent astronomers who've done particularly important work Or from double AS prize winners again, they're winning their prizes for important work This is Greg Loughlin. He's a researcher at Yale University and he's been very involved in Solar system dynamics and exoplanet research. You see there's a picture behind him of the flyby target of New Horizons right on New Year. That's Ultimatouli and He's showing Oumuamua the interstellar visitor to scale there as a little tiny dot Now everybody was interested in Greg's opinion as to whether Some of the speculation about whether Oumuamua was a natural object or whether it might be some kind of interstellar spacecraft They were curious what he thought And it was obvious by the end of the lecture what he thought because he never brought up The possibility that it might be anything other than just a natural body This is Vicky Caledera. She's one of the leading scientists on the laser interferometer Gravitational wave observatory or LIGO project. She was giving a prize lecture on All the recent progress that's been made in gravitational wave astronomy over the last couple of years since the first detection Which was announced in 2016 and made in 2015 As most of you probably know We're on the hunt for dark matter. It makes up most of the matter in the universe. This is Elena Aprile from she's originally Italian She's now at Columbia University and she's the principal investigator on a very large project that is attempting with a big tank of liquid xenon very far underground to Detect the rare but predicted interactions of dark matter particles with ordinary matter and An interesting announcement was made before her talk People were asked or She asked the society not to record her talk and she asked people not to take any pictures of her slides So everybody was very excited thinking that she might make some kind of unveiling of new data That suggested that you know, they had found something that they'd actually measured a dark matter particle But nothing like that came out during the talk. So in the end everybody just decided she must have just not wanted anybody to steal any of her slides in addition to the talks and in fact far more Numerous than the talks are the posters So in the exhibit hall there are rows and rows and rows of 1 meter square posters where people have summarized their work In the form of a poster or as we now have as you can see it lower right We now also have digital posters. They're called I posters What's great about those is that you can stand next to the poster and you can run Videos animations simulations and so on so the poster, you know comes to life and you can see You can see things that are best presented in a dynamic format like you would have during an oral presentation But they're displayed in a poster session where the posters are available all day long You know, if you if you miss somebody's five-minute oral presentation, you've missed it If they're giving a poster you have the opportunity to look at it throughout the week So I posters have become very popular so in addition to all the scientists who come and of course the scientists are There are many from universities many from observatories from NASA although in this case actual mass employees weren't able to come because of the shutdown We also invite the media. So here's a photograph in the press room. You see me in the background Let's see. Do yeah, so So if any of you read space news, this is Jeff Faust Let's see. She's hidden behind my video windows, but this is Allison Klesman from Astronomy Magazine over here and Let's see Alan Boyle formerly of MSNBC. He's now at Geekwire. This is Clara Moskowitz from Scientific American Adam Mann from Space.com so we get a lot of big-name journalists who come to cover the meeting and Most of the rest of this presentation is going to be about the press program and I'll explain why in a second All right, so I'm a firm believer You know, you've heard the proverb if you give a man a fish he eats for a day But if you teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime Same applies to women, of course So I'm a firm believer in that I like to show you how to find Information because I don't have time in this presentation to give you as much information as you probably would like to have So I'm going to tell you how to find more and I'm going to tell you up front So if you go to AAS.org Which is our website There's always a prominent link to the next meeting and if you click on that link You go to the meeting main page and it has a big logo on it like this one And if you scroll down the page, you can see there's a link to press information And that is where you can find the whole schedule for For what is coming in press conferences and so on now Here's if you click on that link, here's the press conference schedule topic and speakers now. Why is that interesting? Well as press officer my job is to organize the press conferences at the meetings. We typically have to a day every day of the meeting now how I do that is I Look at well everybody who's going to give a talk whether it's an oral presentation or a poster presentation They all submit an abstract and so we get the abstracts a few months before the meeting and I look through them trying to decide, you know, which of these presentations is likely to be particularly interesting and newsworthy I Also ask my counterparts at various observatories university astronomy departments NASA centers and so on to Canvas the abstracts from people at their institution to see if they identify anything that looks particularly interesting it's important for me to have public information officers press officers like myself working at these places to To coach their presenters so that the press conferences are really good And also to write up a press release to go with the presentation Which will often have much more information than the presenter can give in the short talk at a press conference so if you Look for a double AS meeting page and find the press information and go to the press conference schedule you can see what I and my counterparts Have collectively decided is the most Exciting stuff to be presented at the meeting Which means you can predict What topics are going to be in the news during and after the meeting? So if you want to impress your friends You can say hey, there's going to be big news on black holes Or there's going to be a big exoplanet unveiling or something like that next week and they'll say well How do you know that we'll say well, you know, I'm connected to the world of astronomy I know people in high places and you know, I've I'm able to make that prediction So this is how you find that information So this is what a press conference typically looks like you see me on the left there I'm introducing a panel. We typically have somewhere between three and five presenters at each briefing and We have a room full of reporters and co-workers and other interested people we try to encourage undergraduates especially to come to press conferences because the presentations are by design Aimed at an audience of more lay people rather than you know scientists who know everything already So press conferences are often the most understandable presentations and as I said, they also represent The hottest results that we think are going to be presented at the meeting. Usually we're right usually It's very rare that we get blindsided that some other talk or poster that we didn't identify as newsworthy Ends up getting any press coverage So this is a title slide from a press conference. You'll see a number of these as I go through I'm just going to show you What the titles of the the topics of the press conferences were and what the top the titles of the Presentations were and I want you to to look at the pictures of the presenters too because I want you to recognize That it's a very diverse group. That is astronomy is not just a bunch of You know old white men in white lab coats You'll see that's very obvious as you see the pictures of the presenters. So our first press conference was on Some new results from Sophia. That's NASA's airborne observatory another Another effect of the shutdown was that Sophia was actually going to fly to Seattle And they were going to have tours every day during the meeting of this giant 747 with a huge telescope looking out a hole In its side, but they weren't able to do that because of the government shutdown The pilots are NASA employees and they couldn't fly the telescope So you can see we had a Number of results on exoplanets here including planets discovered by citizen scientists. Here's the panel So we had five presenters again mix of old and young male and female I'm not going to go into any detail in that briefing because I just don't have enough time I did want to say a little bit about the NASA's new planet hunter the transiting exoplanet survey satellite So we had a status report on the mission by George Ricker who is the principal investigator And some some of the early results. This mission is a follow-on to the Kepler Mission, which everybody's heard about because Kepler blew open the field of exoplanets by finding thousands of them Here's the panel George Ricker is the second from the left He's at MIT as are the other the two people on the right MIT is one of the headquarters of the mission George is the principal investigator the guy in charge and he's very happy here as is everybody else because their telescope which was just launched earlier early last year is Performing flawlessly as it does an all-sky survey of nearby stars the Big orange cloud that you see there is an expected distribution of planets around stars the distance on the bottom. You'll see it's a logarithmic scale so Tess is going to find a lot of planets around nearby stars and Many of those planets are going to be roughly earth-sized or super earth-sized Whereas most of the Kepler stuff, which is the blue was much much farther away And so the great thing about Tess is we're going to be able to look up in the sky Identify a whole bunch of naked eye stars that have exoplanets around them and amateur astronomers will be able to Measure the properties of some of these planets just from you know using CCD cameras on modest-sized telescopes All right. Let's see. There we go. So This is the Kepler field and They've announced just three discoveries so far Sorry, you know the test field. I think I said Kepler. I meant Tess So they've got three exoplanets so far Here's one. It's Around a very low mass star The planet mass is not known yet. They can tell that the planet is crossing in front of the star They see a little dip in the star's brightness But they don't know the mass until they get some spectroscopic observations To see how how much that planet tugs on the star. Here comes another one. I think I missed one Well, I'm just gonna go ahead One always has to worry when there's animation Here's another one this one 23 earth masses around a star that's very much like the Sun and There's some evidence of an earth-sized planet They'll have more information as Tess continues to study that field that region and With any luck ground-based follow-up will demonstrate that there's actually an earth-sized second planet around that star and that's pretty Significant because the star itself is very similar to the Sun all right, we had actually had quite a few press conferences on exoplanet results because as I think you know exoplanets is now one of the hottest areas in astronomy We had so many exoplanet related presentations at this meeting that we had three parallel tracks going at the same time and our attendees were not terribly happy about that because it meant that if they were in exoplanets They could only attend one of three talks at any one time Whereas they might have wanted to hear two or all three But there were so many talks that we had to do that. There's just not enough time in the schedule so here we have I Think the most significant result at this At this briefing was the one from Elizabeth Bailey Hot Jupiter period mass distribution as a signature of in situ formation Elizabeth is at center here Hot Jupiters were the first exoplanets found around normal stars These are Jupiter size or bigger planets that are orbiting at distances like that of Mercury or even closer to their star And it was immediately thought that those couldn't possibly have formed there because it's so hot How could you accumulate all that gas on a planet so close to a hot star? but Elizabeth Has actually done a lot of simulations of Planet formation close by to stars and she's discovered that If the rate of accumulation of rocky material and gaseous material Is is just right You can actually form hot Jupiters around Around bright stars so So the jury is still out as to whether those planets had to form farther out and Work their way in a process called migration or whether they some of them at least might have actually formed in place Almost every year we have a press conference from the Sloan digital sky survey team This is the first digital sky survey. It was started about 15 years ago and it's still going strong They have They've done like four or five different versions of the Sloan digital sky survey Targeting different things. So right now they're getting to the point where They're able to to do spectroscopy of millions of stars And they're discovering You know the actual chemical abundances of different galaxies and all kinds of things. It's really it's quite remarkable And they have also just opened up a southern telescope so that whereas it used to be just a northern survey They're now doing They're surveying basically the entire sky And measuring the spectra of millions of stars, which is quite phenomenal and something that didn't used to be possible So here's the Sloan team All right, one of the most highly anticipated press conferences at this meeting was this one things that go bump in the night sky Because of the first result that you see there early science from chime chime is a new radio telescope It's the canadian hydrogen intensity mapping experiment It's in penticton british columbia. Here's the team Vicki caspy is one of the principles involved in that she's at left And this is the telescope itself I actually have friends in penticton and so at the end of the meeting I flew up there And I had an opportunity to visit chime. It didn't look like this though They'd had a massive snowstorm a couple days earlier and it was everything was white But it's a telescope that's monitoring the sky All the time day and night and listening for among other things these things called fast radio bursts Which have only been discovered in the last decade They're kind of like gamma ray bursts and that they Happen all over the sky and they had happened randomly and they're over almost as soon as they start And like gamma ray burst in in the 1970s. We have very little idea what they actually are The results from chime are very impressive because all the radio telescopes in the world up to this point had discovered Maybe 20 or so two dozen of these things Chime, which is still not fully operational But has only been turned on for about a month has already nearly doubled that number And the most important thing that they just that they announced at this meeting was that they've discovered Only the second fast radio buster that repeats The first fast radio buster that repeats was unique and it was found Because it kept going off other radio telescopes were able to localize it chime has such a big field of view That it can only tell you approximately where something occurs, but it can't pin it down But with much bigger radio telescopes, they were able to localize this repeater to us to a dwarf galaxy A couple hundred million light years away And although they still don't know exactly what the source is Of the burst they at least know where it occurred and now that we found a second repeater Well, it was only announced at the meeting So nobody had had a chance to follow it up yet But you can be sure that right now even as i'm talking there are radio telescopes pointed in the general direction that chime found Trying to to localize the second buster and as chime finds more of these repeaters They're going to be able to finally figure out. Well, what exactly is doing the bursting here? in the case of gamma ray burst it's either colliding neutron stars as we discovered with ligo or Very powerful supernovae, but we don't really know what's going on yet with the fast radio bursters Black holes used to be one of the most popular topics of press conferences at double as meetings Now exoplanets has eclipsed that But we still almost always have something about black holes And in this case, uh, one of the most interesting presentations was by diraj posham from mit His paper was published in science. Uh, the same day as the press conference He's the second from the left Here again, you see a fair amount of diversity In terms of age gender race, etc, which i'm very happy and i should say i don't deliberately set out to do this It's just that our field is becoming sufficiently diverse that Just by luck of the draw we get panels that are this diverse and so i'm happy about that So posham found a very powerful x-ray outburst from a From a source that was known to have a black hole in it um, and the x-rays Are presumably because of the way they flicker. They're clearly emitted very close to the black hole so they're encoding information about the environment in this black hole and black holes Really can be characterized by just a few parameters And when you get x-rays coming from from the environment of a black hole They're going to be telling you something about the black hole's mass the spin of the black hole And how far away the source is from the center of the black hole And what they discovered in this case was a very very bright flare from a galaxy that's nearly 300 million light years away but it Was periodic the signal was periodic And when they looked at all the ways you could generate a periodic signal they figured out that they must be essentially seeing x-rays from Very very close to the event horizon of the black hole and that this spin period Or that this period of 130 seconds Is the rotation or the orbit of the particles around the black hole And based on the size and mass of the black hole That tells them that these particles are moving About half the speed of light maybe even 70 percent the speed of light So that's pretty neat And it's telling us something about the black hole spin, but what it's telling us exactly they don't know yet But there's some way to disentangle the mass and the spin and the period of the Of the x-ray variation to figure out how fast The black hole itself is spinning This is an artist's conception So what happened was A the burst came from A star getting too close to the black hole and being ripped apart by tidal forces the intense Gravitational tidal forces of the black hole and that's what caused the flare and it's this material going around As it's being devoured by the back by the black hole that gave it that gave the 132nd period All right more exoplanet stuff There were two very newsworthy results in this briefing The first from the two guys on the left Thane Curry and Olivier Guillaume And the one on the right Ed Geinem from Villanova So I'm going to very quickly just go through a couple of things So the Subaru telescope at left is japan's entry into the eight meter class telescopes That's on manakea And they've developed a camera and spectograph That are essentially the third generation Of instruments that are designed to image Exoplanets around host stars now you've often heard the analogy that an exoplanet around a star The trying to see an exoplanet around a star is like trying to see a firefly right next to a search light So these cameras Have what's called a coronagraph That blocks the light of the star and allows you to see The space right around the star that would normally just be Burned out by glare So this slide summarizes the progress that's been made over the last 20 years At first the they would very crudely block the star and nobody actually could see any Exoplanets when doing that, but when you add adaptive optics, which counteracts the blurring of the atmosphere to the coronagraph Suddenly you can start to pick out exoplanets You can be sure they're exoplanets and not background stars because they orbit around the star As you take pictures over time And at lower right is the image of this system hr 8 7 9 9 Which is very well known because it has four exoplanets that have been directly imaged, but now You can not only image them, but you can very cleanly separate them Not only from the star but from each other And because this particular instrument not only images them but also takes spectra You can begin to characterize the planets Even if they don't transit in front of their stars such that the star light gets filtered through their atmosphere So here's a case kappa andromity Where a planet has been imaged directly you can see it at upper left and there's a spectrum That was taken by the same system using adaptive optics and the coronagraph That allows you to see water absorption and co absorption in the atmosphere of this planet Even though it's not transiting so as these kind of systems continue to be developed We're going to be able to characterize exoplanets in great detail And tess is very important to this because tess is going to find planets around nearby stars where It'll be easier to separate the stars from the planets And everything will be and the planets will be much brighter than they would be around a more distant target Enabling spectroscopy to be done more efficiently And then ed guinen gave us some interesting food for thought about the star Or the star barnard star and the planet that was announced just last year Which they're calling barnard b It's a red dwarf star. So it's It's much fainter and smaller than the sun The planet is thought to be a few earth masses If you've been paying attention to the discussion about habitability you may have heard that You know the habitable zone around a red dwarf star is much closer to the star than the habitable zone around a sunlight star because the star is much fainter And red dwarfs are often very active And so there's been concern that their persistent flaring Would essentially sterilize any planets that would otherwise be in the zone where liquid water might occur on their surface So ed guinen and his students Did a very detailed study of this star And the planet based on what they've been able to discern about it and they figured out that In many respects, it's living in a more benign environment Than earth is and it's certainly a more benign environment than the star that's Proxima centauri the nearest star to earth Which also has a planet going around it and is also a red dwarf And so what they've done is they figured out that That at least at the surface The planet if the planet were To host life, it wouldn't be subjected to such high energy radiation that it would kill the life But can you have A habitable zone or can you have habitability on a planet that's temperature is very very cold as this one must be given its distance from From the star the answer is well, it could have if it had geothermal energy Which earth does of course And venus and mercury they all have hot cores If you had sufficient geothermal energy you could end up with a subsurface ocean like around like Io Not Io sorry Europa And Potentially Titan potentially Enceladus some of the moons of the outer planets These are thought now to have subsurface oceans of liquid water. You could have an environment like that On barnard b and you wouldn't have so much high energy radiation coming from above That it would sterilize any life in the ocean So the idea here is that you could actually have a habitable planet The problem is of course Confirming that it's habitable and that's the next big Frontier in astronomy or at least an exoplanet astronomy. So the last press conference was astronomers have a cow They did really get very excited Because they've found a A transient event a star That suddenly or an object that suddenly brightened dramatically And they wanted At first everybody thought it was a supernova, but then The more they looked at it the more confused they became because it didn't behave like an ordinary supernova So this is the team that was reporting Again, they were publishing This time in nature. We arranged to have the nature paper published coincident with the press conference um, and so this team Described how they've identified this very strange object that was Like a supernova but extremely luminous It rose and fell much more quickly than an ordinary supernova and It stayed It had a central engine that was that was glowing for weeks Which is unusual usually, you know, it goes off And what's glowing is the Is the material around the star that died So they came up with two possible explanations. One is that it's An energetic star or an energetic jet that Came out of an exploding star that's colliding with previous ejecta. So basically a supernova where Uh, you have energy being poured out of the central engine into the gas that's been previously ejected by the star Or another one of these tidal disruption events where you have a star get too close to a black hole In this case, it wouldn't be a stellar mass black hole in order to have the properties that are observed It would have to be a black hole that was thousands Maybe tens of thousands of solar masses and that particular kind of black hole has not been detected directly before So we had presentations that suggested it could be one or the other And what I liked about this was that it showed not just Some people could cynically say well, it showed that scientists don't you know, they don't agree with each other They're not able to get a good result here. They don't know what they're looking at Um, but that's not really what's going on here Um, what they're doing is showing you how the process of science works. You get a discovery Um, it's unusual which of course is exciting And you try to figure out what's going on and you know, this thing only popped off in june of 2018 and it it's now basically faded So they've got as much data as they could get In fact, they got data from almost every instrument on the planet and orbiting the planet And there are competing Theories about what it could be and they're working on trying to sort out which it is That's the way things work eventually They may not ever figure out exactly what this one was because again, it's faded now and they can't look at it anymore but Now that they know that this particular kind of transient exists They're going to look for more and with all the surveys that are being done Ground based as well as space based surveys for things that pop off and disappear quickly They're going to find a lot of them. I'm sure now the reason it's called cow is because all variable objects get assigned a An alphanumeric code when they're first discovered This one just happened to come out with the code including c o w Which spells cow? So, uh, so they call it the cow and it's the first time at a press conference that we ever rang a cowbell All right. Now I showed you this slide earlier. This was a list of the press conference the first press conference By the this is what the what it looks like on the website At the beginning of the meeting but by the end of the meeting If you go to the same page the press kit page and look at the list now, you'll see that everything is links I link from each press Conference presentation title to the presentation file the powerpoint or the keynote or whatever it was I link to the press releases that may have been issued by the By the scientist institution and so if you go to that press information page for aas 233, which is our seattle meeting and you Click on the press kit you'll get to this page and you'll be able to click on these links and see Each of the presentation files if you're interested in in learning more Also, I wanted to mention that we webcast our press conferences Because there's a fair number of journalists who don't have funding to come to the meeting So if you go to that press information page and click on that link you come up to the press conference webcast page And you don't have to have a password to watch the webcast at least not most of the time There are occasions where I have to password protect the webcast, but mostly the only thing that's password protected is the q&a And that's just to keep trolls out of the chat room Where we have journalists asking questions Also, we archive the press conference webcast. So if you're interested in actually Watching and listening to and seeing the slides from all eight of the press conferences at the seattle meeting Just click on that link and go to this archived webcast page If you click on any of the titles of the press conferences Up comes a video where you can see the entire briefing from start to finish I also wanted to mention before we leave that The american astronomical society Now welcomes educators as well as amateur astronomers into the membership of the as the Um Most relevant category for most of you. I think would be amateur affiliate. Uh, that's primarily for amateur astronomers who are You know try actually doing some science with their equipment. Uh, but you don't have to be But if you're uh, just interested in you know being a member and and getting access to the uh To the member newsletters and the science news that that we send out And you might want to come to some of the meetings you can Obviously members get a much better rate to attend the meetings than non-members But if you're doing primarily outreach as opposed to research Um, and I know since you're uh, mostly members of the night sky network If you're doing outreach, you might want to consider becoming an educator affiliate Which is another option. Although the amateur affiliate price is cheaper. So that might be the better way to go Our next meeting is going to be in st. Louis in june. It'll be a smaller meeting than the super bowl of astronomy It'll be like an ordinary game, I guess And uh We'll have press conferences there too and you'll uh If you go to the as 234 website, you'll be able to see as we get closer to the meeting What the big stories will be coming out of st. Louis And that's it One thing that wasn't on my screen as I've been going through this was a clock. So I hope I haven't gone too far over No, we're doing really good. It's uh now Nine minutes to the hour. So we're we're doing great. Excellent. Perfect So if anyone has any questions, uh for rick, please type it into the q&a window We've got a couple of here, which I think had mainly to do with the availability of The press conferences and I think we answered them So Jeffrey asked our press conferences from past double as annual meetings available for streaming and I think you answered that Yep, they go back from as far as we started doing the webcast, which is uh, I think five years now And then uh, so let's see if we got that then, uh We're the presentations at the meeting recorded if so are they available to the public Uh, yep, it looks like they are. I think that's right. Let me clarify because We in addition to the webcasts of the press conferences, we actually do record all of the plenary talks They are these are the presentations, uh, you know by the prominent scientists who have been invited to give one-hour lectures now Those are available to aas members Within a few weeks of the end of the meeting and Six months later After the next meeting takes place the previous meetings plenary talks are available publicly The way to find them is to go to the past meeting pages where there will be a link To the videos so the videos from this Meetings plenary talks will be posted Behind a member login within the next couple of weeks, but then by june or july they'll all be available publicly So would that benefit be uh, is that available to the amateur members and the educator members? If you're a member and you get a member login, you can uh, you can see the plenary talks as soon as they're posted So that's a pretty good benefit of it is it isn't joining It is yeah fantastic Okay, so uh bruce asked what are some of the most interesting articles presentation that we can pass on to the youth That we encounter public astronomy events I think um based on my own experience just talking with Students and families You know people are interested in this stuff that That's easy to follow like exoplanet research, right? We're looking for other planets like earth around stars like the sun Possible abodes of life so that always seems to be of interest to people And then uh, the crazy sexy far out stuff like black holes dark matter dark energy You know, what's the fate of the universe? Are we all going to fall into a black hole? Is the universe going to die a cold death? um, so things that involve big picture questions and Uh, kind of flights of fancy I think um But the one that's the You know that that seems to be Asked by everybody when they find out you're an astronomer is you know, do you think there's life elsewhere? And and that question is driving a really big chunk of astronomy research in the 21st century okay, so William asked a question here and i'm going to kind of expand this a little bit He specifically was asking what's the best way to buy a meteorite? I know that it's legitimate I think that You know, maybe we could expand this and say so you hear some something that somebody is claiming Astronomically, uh, what's the best way to know that that's a legitimate? Um, you know piece of research Okay, I know that you deal with that a lot. Yeah, that's right. In fact, um, whenever you you have a public Contact info, uh, you hear from members of the public who think they've discovered something and I often send people to The iau minor planet center, which is sort of a repository of all things transient happening in the sky The latest supernova discoveries latest asteroid discoveries comments, etc If you don't see anything else about what you think you've discovered At the minor planet center. There's a pretty good chance that Well, I mean on the one hand, maybe you've actually discovered something But it's more likely since Since there's lots and lots of people looking at the sky every night You're just misinterpreting something. You know, maybe you saw A bright planet that you just didn't recognize or you saw something else It's hard to say but For things like meteorites You know, it's very easy to be fooled Uh into thinking that that uh an unusual rock might be a meteorite the best way to know that you're getting something that's Really a meteorite if you actually want to spend money on it Is to buy from a reputable dealer and these are the people who advertise in magazines like sky and telescope and astronomy Um, if you just go online to ebay and you know buy a meteorite from some third-party seller Chances are you you're gonna end up wasting your money on a meteor wrong and I could put in a plug for our In one of our tokens the space rocks cope toolkit, which many of the clubs have We have a meteorite or meteor wrong and That's an activity in there and we will actually be featuring that toolkit in an upcoming toolkit webinar Um, we're running real close here. I don't know. We want to protect your time and get done here And so we're going to make this the last question of the evening brawn asked You've attended many double as meetings from your personal experience Do any of these stand out as extra special special guest speaker paper or announcement? What are the highlights of your career? Yeah, I think um, it's interesting because I've been attending meetings Not just since I started working for the double as 10 years ago But also when I was at sky and telescope I used to go as press Uh and sit in on the press conferences and you know wander around and look for good stories So, uh, there were three There were three instances Uh, where that's really stand out The first was in 1989 When john mather who subsequently went on to win a nobel prize projected The cosmic background explorer spectrum of the cosmic microwave background And it was a perfect fit to a black body and The entire audience rose In near unison in a standing ovation because it was such a monumental piece of work To show that the cosmic background really did have the spectrum of a black body In in the couple of years leading up to it a number of ground-based experiments had hinted That there were some deviations from a pure black body. Those were all found to be spurious another one was in 1998 when The discovery of cosmic acceleration was announced The reaction was the opposite It was such a shock that the expansion of the universe was accelerating rather than slowing That people kind of sat there in stunned silence And then the third was I think Oh, yeah, this would have been 1994 um When astronaut jeff hoffman who is himself an astronomer Came to our meeting to describe having fixed Hubble After it was discovered to have had optical problems And he got a standing ovation too because he had basically saved NASA And saved the Hubble space telescope program for this very audience people at the double as meaning who have Subsequently gone on to use that telescope for nearly 30 years To produce all kinds of wonderful science All right, well, thank you very much for the reminiscing those are certainly some High points I think for the entire astronomical community and it must have been really special to have been there for those announcements Definitely. So yeah, thank you some great history. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah Well, thank you so much rick. This is I you know, thank you for joining us. We you know, we're grateful that you're out there Doing the hard work to bring all of these wonderful Discoveries to the public in an understandable way. And so thank you For your continuing work and we look forward to many more opportunities in the future Well, thanks so much for inviting me. It was a real pleasure to be here this evening All right And that's all for tonight You will confine this webinar along with many others on the next sky network website in the outreach resources section Each webinar's page also features additional resources and activities We will post tonight's presentation on the night sky network youtube channel in the next few days