Dear Colleague,
The New Year is approaching and we like to take this opportunity to wish you all a productive year in your professional activity and peace and happiness in your personal life.
It is also time to look back to what happened in 2016, a remarkable year for our Union.
First of all, we were very pleased and honored by the award of the prestigious medal of the Edinburgh Science Festival to Kevin Govender, the Director of the Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD) and to the IAU in the person of its President, Silvia Torres-Peimbert. It was a recognition of the soundness of our Strategic Plan, a distinctive initiative of IAU among other Scientific Unions.
In May, the Executive Committee discussed several proposals aimed at increasing the participation by young researchers in the activity of the Union: an IAU PhD prize to recognize excellence in Astrophysics, which has been already implemented and announced (https://www.iau.org/news/announcements/detail/ann16044/) and the proposal to introduce the new category of Junior Member, open to PhD students close to the conclusion of their thesis and to early post-doc researchers. The proposal requires a modification of the Statutes and must therefore be approved by the General Assembly: a questionnaire aimed at sounding the opinion of the National Members has been distributed and the results will be published early next year. If approved, we would see a major injection of young blood in our Union.
The attention of the IAU towards young astronomers is also testified by the organization of the International School for Young Astronomers (ISYA - https://www.iau.org/science/collaborative/young_astronomers/), which is managed by the Office for Young Astronomers (OYA) with the important contribution by the Norwegian Academy of Science. The OYA has been recently restructured and the IAU will increase the financial contribution to the ISYA, making possible the organization of up to 3 Schools in a biennium.
We were very pleased by receiving an unsurpassed number of Letters of Intent to propose scientific meetings in 2018, the year of the XXX GA in Vienna: 36 for Symposia and 38 for Focus Meeting to take place at the GA and 10 for Symposia outside the GA. We can certainly expect a very exciting General Assembly in 2018! Incidentally, in Vienna we will start the celebrations for the first 100-year anniversary of the IAU, which was founded in 1919: several initiatives are being planned which will make the XXX GA even more memorable.
We are happy to celebrate the end of 2016 with an act which is deeply rooted in the history of Astronomy and of the IAU: assigning names to stars! The IAU Working Group on Star Names, approved by the Executive Committee last May, has published a list of 227 star names: the large majority of these are not new, rather they belong to well established traditions, but they were never officially approved by the IAU.
Best wishes to all,
Silvia Torres-Peimbert and Piero Benvenuti
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14 October 2016: The IAU is pleased to announce a new prize, called the IAU PhD Prize, to recognise outstanding scientific achievement in astrophysics around the world. Each IAU Division will, once a ...
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26 September 2016: The program of IAU scientific meetings (Symposia, Focus Meetings, Division Meetings, Regional Meetings) is one of the most important methods by which the IAU pursues its goal of promoting astronomy ...
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16 June 2016: The IAU Executive Committee has published a summary of its meeting held in Mexico City between 4 and 6 May 2016.
The summary outlines discussions and decisions in the following ...
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18 May 2016: The IAU Symposia are the scientific flagship of the IAU. They are intended to significantly advance the field, seeking answers to the current key questions and/or emerging concepts through ...
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24 November 2016: The creation of a specialised IAU Working Group, the Working Group on Star Names (WGSN), was approved by the IAU Executive Committee in May 2016 to formalise star names that ...
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24 November 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #22 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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7 November 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #21 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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3 November 2016: The IAU OAD Newsletter #14 is now online. It is issued quarterly by the IAU Office of Astronomy for Development and some highlights of this issue are:
OAD represented at ...
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25 October 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #20 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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7 October 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #19 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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22 September 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #18 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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7 September 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #17 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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2 September 2016: Three pioneering scientists are the recipients of this year’s Kavli Prize in Astrophysics for their research on gravitational waves.
The 2016 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics is shared between Ronald ...
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25 August 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #16 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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9 August 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #15 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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5 August 2016: The 20th issue of the Communicating Astronomy with the Public journal is out now!
In this issue astronomy communication practitioners share with us new sonification software designed to bring the ...
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28 July 2016: The IAU Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD) has issued its 5th annual call for proposals for astronomy-for-development projects. The IAU has earmarked approximately €110 000 per year for OAD ...
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25 July 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #14 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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22 July 2016: The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is profoundly concerned by the recent events in Turkey, and by the subsequent news that the national education system and the universities might be heavily ...
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12 July 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #12 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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24 June 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #12 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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13 June 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #11 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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10 June 2016: The IAU is delighted to report that its President, Silvia Torres-Peimbert, has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Ben Gurion University (BGU) in Beer Sheva, Israel. The award was ...
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1 June 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #9 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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30 May 2016: Maria Nikolayevna Drozdovskaya, from Leiden University, and Laetitia Delrez, from the University of Liège, have been awarded The Gruber Foundation Fellowship
This year, the evaluation panel has decided to award ...
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9 May 2016: The Astronomy Outreach Newsletter 2016 #9 is now online. It is produced by the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach and brings to the general public the latest information about events ...
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