By / par Rob Thacker (CASCA President)
(Cassiopeia – Winter / hivers 2019)
Dear CASCA Members,
This fall has been a busy few months! I hope you have had a chance to recover from the efforts of proposal writing on top of detailed LRP consultations.
Since I last communicated, we have a welcomed the new CASCA Administrator, Jessica, and I’d like to encourage you to both welcome Jessica and say a big thank you to Susan Di Francesco who officially steps down on December 31st. On the administrative side we have finally solved the headache that PayPal was presenting, and I’m glad to say as of late November we are again able to accept payments via that route. I encourage anyone to take a read of a Kafka novel and then to send an email to PayPal, as that seems appropriate preparation for dealing with them.
The awarding of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics for work in astronomy was especially exciting, albeit with the caveats of the known issues with the Nobel awards. After much discussion within the CASCA Board we have the following to say:
The CASCA Board was delighted to see that astronomy and cosmology were the focus of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. The work of Jim Peebles (who was born in Manitoba) played a foundational role in many areas of cosmological physics (including the large-scale structure of galaxies and the cosmic microwave background radiation). The other laureates also richly deserve their prizes: the discovery of 51 Pegasi b by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz opened up the field of exoplanet observations and helped turn it into the spectacularly vibrant area of astrophysics that it is today. We wholeheartedly congratulate Drs Peebles, Mayor and Queloz for their exceptional accomplishments.
Following the awarding of the prize, there has been a number of questions about which particular exoplanet should be acknowledged as the most key discovery. The existence of pulsar planets (e.g.
Wolszczan & Frail, Nature, 355, 145, 1992) and particularly large gas giants/brown dwarfs (Latham et al., Nature, 339, 38, 1989) were known prior to the 51 Pegasi announcement.
In the midst of this, the CASCA Board thought it appropriate to remind members of the work of Bruce
Campbell, Gordon Walker, and Stephenson Yang (ApJ, 331, 902, 1988) which also played an important
role in founding the field of exoplanet research. In particular, we would like to highlight their work on gamma Cephei b. Their long-term monitoring program on the CFHT from 1981 to 1993 had sufficient sensitivity to discover Jupiter-like planets, and with modern statistical methods the 1995 follow-up work of Walker et al. (Icarus, 116, 359, 1995), which included a new analysis of gamma Cephei b data, would be considered a strong detection. The estimated period of 2.52 yrs in that work is very close to the now accepted value of 2.47 yrs.
However, following the 1992 analysis which speculated that the gamma Cephei b signal was close to a
possible pulsation mode, the 1995 work was treated with some skepticism. There is no argument that
the work of Drs Mayor & Queloz, as well as their collaborators, created an unexpected and important avenue of exoplanet research, and while celebrating Mayor and Queloz, we think it appropriate to also celebrate the pioneering work of Campbell, Walker and Yang.
CASCA “Seeds” Program
I’d like to highlight the CASCA “Seeds” program that was announced at the AGM this summer: each year, the CASCA Board will allocate up to $5K of seed funding to activities spearheaded by CASCA
members that benefit the Society. All initiatives and/or events that are consistent with CASCA’s Mission Statement are eligible to receive CASCA Seed funding, though an emphasis will be placed on activities that are difficult to fund via other mechanisms. The intent of the CASCA Seeds program is to support new and/or unique opportunities for CASCA members; the same initiative is therefore unlikely to be funded more than once.
Full details of the program and application process are available here (English) and here (Francais). We hope that some great new initiatives can grow out of this program!
Sustainability
Anyone who has read through the tremendous list of white papers submitted to the LRP process cannot
have failed to have noticed a very significant number of recommendations put squarely in the hands of CASCA as an organization. On one hand I feel buoyed by the great faith in CASCA that you are showing by making these recommendations, although on the other hand I confess that the entire suite comes across as somewhat daunting. The Board is currently working on determining what to do about these many recommendations, especially given that these recommendations are input into the LRP process, and we need to let that process take its course.
Many very important issues have been brought up, especially around ethical considerations for our field, but one concern stood out for immediate action in the view of several Board members, specifically that of sustainability. I am thus happy to notify the community that the Board has struck an ad hoc committee on sustainability and we are in the process of filling that committee as I write. We have agreed to run this committee in an ad hoc form for one year, with a view to reviewing its progress at the end of 2020.
I’d like to end by again thanking all of you – again – for your efforts in supporting CASCA and the
astronomy community. With a couple of exceptions for our staff members, we are a Society of volunteers and depend entirely on your efforts to make our activities possible.
Happy Holidays, and all the best for 2020!
Rob
