Goodbye #AAS244 and #MadisonWI.
I had fun and learned a lot. I also ate a lot of cheese.
See you all at #AAS245!

The final plenary of the conference: Scanning the X-ray Sky for Dark Matter by Kerstin Perez, Columbia University.

What is dark matter? Is it a new kind of particle?

Looking for an anomalous signal, astroparticle physicists go out looking for dark matter, find something, and then astronomers tell them it's something else — it’s usually pulsars.

Using the annoying stray light in NuStar, you can search for signals of sterile neutrinos, a dark matter candidate. Only upper limits so far. #AAS244

Day 4 of #AAS244
Here is a video with a sped-up walkthrough of the Monona Terrace Conference Center and the exhibit hall.
https://youtu.be/hW-zCnvkpI4

Jessie Thwaites: Preparations are underway to observe the expected nova in T CrB with IceCube. It's closer, in a better area of the sky for detector sensitivity, and has a short eruption, so they are optimistic they will see something.
#AAS244

First session: The Powerful Shocks in Novae V: Revisiting Novae with a Multi-messenger Approach

Kirill Sokolovsky: NuSTAR X-ray observations of classical novae show depleted iron (or maybe enhanced CNO elements). X-ray light curves don't have periodic changes in brightness like in visible light, suggesting X-rays are made further out.

Justin Vandenbroucke: Do novae produce neutrinos? Probably, but searches of IceCube Neutrino observatory data don't find anything, only upper limits. #AAS244

And finally ending the day with this abomination — mac and cheese pizza. #AAS244

Next the RAS Gold Plenary Lecture: Challenges to the Cosmological Model, John Peacock, University of Edinburgh.

Do headlines about results that break the consensus Lambda CDM model of the Universe hold up?

"Maybe there is something wrong with cosmology. Ok, fine, but I’m not giving the medal back."

The Hubble tension — "Once upon a time this level of agreement would be considered miraculous."

Observational evidence prefers a Lambda CMD model with a slightly smaller matter density #AAS244

Next a panel with Historic Observatories: Current Activities and Potential for Education, Public Outreach, and Research, with representatives from the Washburn Observatory, Detroit Observatory, Lick Observatory, Lowell Observatory, Yerkes Observatory, and Alliance of Historic Observatories.

Where do historical observatories fit into a modern scientific context? Developing smaller instruments for larger telescopes. Testing new technology, making connections to industry and universities. #AAS244

Next: The STScI Town Hall

Hubble is transitioning to 1-gyro mode after issues with gyro 3. The probability that at least one gyro will be functional to 2030 is above 90%. Budget cuts from NASA will reduce the operations budget by about 10%, and the only way to cut costs is by reducing support for science instruments.

JWST is continuing to function well and is doing great science.
Roman data is so big that you will have to run analysis on the cloud science platform, not your laptop. #AAS244

AstroBites has a great interview with Robert Hurt #AAS244
https://astrobites.org/2024/06/11/meet-the-aas-keynote-speakers-dr-robert-hurt/

Next Plenary Lecture: When Data is Not Enough: Illustrating Astrophysics for the Public by Robert Hurt, Caltech/IPAC.

He discussed his career working on producing visualizations and illustrations to communicate science.

Art connects known facts, possibilities, and even known falsehoods (like relative scales), to give you visual context to understand scientific results. It can even form visual hypotheses with the available information (since you have to commit to something). #AAS244

Next was Creating the Story of Community in Astronomy: Multimedia Storytelling that Reflects, Honors, Includes, and Inspires, a panel discussion on storytelling.

The One Sky project brought together partners from across the world to tell a traditional astronomy story in an animated, full-dome video for planetariums.

My colleague Yesenia Pérez got to debut a rough cut of the video The Physics of Pō, that we have been working on with our Hawaiin partners from 'Imiloa. #AAS244

Day 3 of #AAS244
First Plenary of the day was: The Lives and Deaths of Star Clusters, and the Black Holes they Make along the Way by Carl Rodriguez, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It's actually quite hard to create the 30-solar-ish black holes found by LIGO and Gaia with normal stars, but it might be possible in the dense environment of stellar clusters.

They simulate star clusters moving through their host galaxies to see if mergers can create black holes with the right mass.

First talk of the day done -- now to write my Astro on Tap talk for tonight! #AAS244

Hi everyone at #AAS244 -- swing by the Exhibitor Theater (in the Exhibit Hall, toward the back) at 10 AM today to hear @ThomasConnor talk about 25 Years of Science with NASA's Flagship X-ray Observatory.

Wienermobile sighting at #AAS244 in front of the capitol!

Final Plenary Lecture: With a Wild Surmise: A New Era of Exoplanet Exploration, Tom Beatty, University of Wisconsin at Madison.

JWST is revolutionizing the field, allowing us to go beyond broad colors (Spitzer) or visible/near-IR spectra focused on water (Hubble). JWST can observe many more molecules, especially those with carbon and oxygen, and see features from clouds.

JWST can also see differences in the dawn and dust terminators of exoplanets like WASP-107 b. #AAS244

Next Plenary Lecture: Leveraging AI to Transform the Astronomy Data Revolution into a Discovery Revolution, Cecilia Garraffo, CfA.

Their group builds AI models for large astronomical data sets. Their autoencoder uses physical parameters, not a "black box", to reduce the dimensionality of the data.

You need probabilistic models for exoplanets to tell what compositions fit the data within errors.

To apply models trained on synthetic data to real data, you can use transfer learning. #AAS244

I managed to catch the last talk of the Laboratory Astrophysics Division III session - JWST Data Cubes of the Protostellar Jet HH 46, Patrick Hartigan.

The MIRI IFU data gives you a spectrum of every pixel, in this case, the center of the jets blown out by the binary protostars in HH46/47. Since you can also get the velocities of the gas from the spectra, you can map the gas in the blue-shifted lobe pointing toward us and the red-shifted lobe pointing away from us. #AAS244

Macarena Garcia Marin gave an update on scientific highlights and data pipeline processing updates.

This included the farthest known galaxy from JADES, a secondary atmosphere on the exoplanet 55 Cancri e, the dusty "cat's tail" in the debris disk in Beta Pic, hydrocarbons in the protoplanetary disk ISO-ChaI 147, and observations of our solar system.

Pipeline corrections include a correction for "snowballs" in near-IR detectors, 1/f noise in NIRSpec, and fringes in MIRI MRS. #AAS244