Eta Carinae Splinter session at 223rd AAS Meeting January 2014, Washington, DC, USA
Ted Gull(1), Michael Corcoran(1,2), Augusto Damineli(3), Kenji Hamaguchi(1,4), Thomas Madura(1,5), Mairan Teodoro(1,6)
(1) NASA/GSFC, (2) CREST, (3) Univ Sao Paulo, (4) UMBC, (5) NPP, (6) Brazil Science w/o Borders
Eta Carinae continues to challenge both observers and modelers as it changes in apparent brightness and spectroscopic properties, both with a 5.5-year periodicity and in the long term.
Eta Carinae will go through its next periastron passage in late July 2014. As noted by Mairan Teodoro (mairan.teodoro@nasa.gov) in the November/December 2012 Massive Star Newsletter, a call is out for coordination of an international campaign for ground-based monitoring of this event (see www.etacar2014.wikidot.com .
We bring to your attention several additional programs: an HST/STIS multi-cycle program to map the interacting winds of Eta Carinae (see Gull et al 2009 MNRAS 396, 1308, Gull et al 2011 ApJ 743, L3 and HST programs 12750, 13014), is scheduled to continue at critical samplings across periastron through January 2015; ongoing X-Ray flux monitoring is being proposed by Mike Corcoran to use Swift to extend the studies accomplished with RXTE (see Corcoran et al, 2010 ApJ 725, 1528); ongoing CHANDRA/XMM/SUZAKU X-ray spectral studies (see Hamaguchi et al., 2012, ASPC 465, 325); 3D hydrodynamic models are being developed to increasingly characterize the interacting winds of the massive binary system and derive properties of the two massive companions (see Parkin et, 2009 MNRAS 400, 1657; Madura et al, 2012 MNRAS 420, 2064; Russell 2013 PhD thesis, UDel).
The American Astronomical Society Meeting 223 is scheduled for the first week in January 2014 near Washington, DC, USA. We are proposing a one-day splinter session within the meeting with the purpose to bring together researchers interested in providing and coordinating observations and/or models pertaining to the behavior of this intriguing binary system. Likely the session would be separated into two parts: what we currently know about the binary, its winds and ejecta and what we need to learn from the periastron event by either observation or theory.
Given the widespread interest in this massive star system, we would like to obtain an estimate of those who plan to attend and we solicit potential contributions to the splinter session independent of the main meeting. A previous session held at Mt. Rainer in 2001 for the Hubble Treasury Eta Carinae Program had an attendance of approximately 40 interested researchers. A special session at the 2009 IAU General Assembly had well over 100 attendees. Contributions to this splinter session will be separate from the main meeting. Posters and talks on Eta Carinae in the scheduled AAS meeting sessions are strongly encouraged, and will be separate from this splinter session intended to provide a focussed review on what is known about Eta Carinae and what we wish to learn through studies of the upcoming periastron event.
Those interested in participating in and/or contributing to the session should contact Ted Gull (Ted.Gull@nasa.gov) by 1 August 2013.
Reference: AAS Meeting 223 proposal
Status: Other
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Email: Ted.Gull@nasa.gov