Sunday morning, 6 AM. Following a mad dash to National Airport to catch my plane for LA, I spent the next 5 hours on the plane, sleeping, or reading the latest issue of the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. Within this thick journal were listed the titles and authors of all of the 850 research papers that would be presented at the Pasadena American Astronomical Society meeting hosted by Caltech , along with brief summaries of what would be discussed by the authors. Twice each year the AAS sponsors a 4 day symposium on current research in astronomy. Anyone anxious to announce a new result or discovery manages to apply for a slot of time in the program. Not only is it exciting to tell others of your work, but we all enjoy meeting colleagues and aquaintances we haven't seen in years. Of course there's also the thrill of getting away from your familiar environment and seeing a new part of the country.
At AAS meetings, most papers presented are concerned with the identification and description of the physical properties of new classes of objects. This is often done by pushing existing observing techniques to their limits. Other research programs try to explain, theoretically, why some objects appear the way they do and how they are related to other classes of objects we think we know something about. Both types of research are immensely exciting and are a constant wellspring of surprises.
LA was grey and wet, and the descent through the miles and miles of dense rain clouds forced my thoughts to the jet's collision avoidance system. During the bus ride to the Holiday Inn in Pasadena I espied two signs convincing me I had arrived in a very unusual place indeed: "Smog, $ 18.95" and a bit further down the highway, "Rolls Royce $ 239.95/day, all else $ 21.95/day". Why anyone would want to buy smog I hadn't the faintest idea. This struck me as akin to peddling snow to Eskimos. I was sure I didn't want to meet the seller.
Hotel check-in was the familiar ritual that it is everywhere. I got a key and the room number from the nameless clerk at the front desk and dragged my heavy suitcase down a long hallway on the 5th floor, "Last room on the right, four floors up!" he said with a plastic smile. But, the number on the door didn't match the number on the key, so I dragged the suitcase down another long dark hallway until the numbers matched up. Room 571 was a 4000 cubic foot cubbyhole with a king-sized bed and cable TV. A colorful sign on the TV promised me that for a few extra bucks I could even watch sleazy programs on the late show. It took me 5 minutes to unpack what little I had brought and I did so while whistling a few measures from Debussy's 'Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun'. My majestic view out the window included a rain- soaked tennis court, a rain-soaked courtyard and across the street a shopping mall and the Pasadena Ice Skating Rink. Not a person to be seen anywhere on this dreary, Sunday afternoon. In the reverie of looking out the window, it occured to me that I had a tough decission to make. With an annoying sore throat in the making, do I dare walk through the rain to the Hilton for the 6:30 PM 'Social Hour' risking laryngitus, or do I stay in my room tonight? Not much of a choice, really.
The amount of information presented at these conventions is truly staggering. AAS meetings are like busy marketplaces with many vendors hawking their wares. Unless you are careful and selective you will wind up with an empty shopping cart and an expensive bill for the travel arrangements when you leave. I particularly enjoy seeking out as many poster papers and talks as possible relating to a particular topic I am actively working on at the time. At this meeting, I was looking for information about hydrodynamic theory applied to astrophysical situations, and anything having to do with how molecular clouds may interact with the interstellar medium. Failing to find such information, or unable to talk to the people I know who work on such topics, I settled for 'cultural enrichment' i.e. finding out what the latest, hot discoveries are. At least this way I would be one step ahead of what will eventually get published about this convention in the New York Times, or announced by Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News.
Day 1 opened with a welcoming speech in the Civic Auditorium by the local organizing chairman Alan Dressler. He apologized that the rest of his committee could not be present because they decided to go skiing in the Sierras instead. Frank Drake then introduced Jocelyn Bell Burnell who was to be the first recipient of the Beatrice Tinsley Award for her discovery in 1966 of the pulsar. Frank gave us a review of the discovery of the pulsar and the impact that they have had on the astronomical community, including how the giant, multi-million dollar, Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico was outfitted with a $ 35.00 Sears TV antenna to improve its reception of the pulsar radio signals! Jocelyn gratefully accepted the award and countered with an acerbic comment that the discovery had looked very good on her Resume and had recently helped her secure her first tenured job after all these years.
Nearly all of the oral presentations given include the use of hand-lettered transparencies called 'viewgraphs' projected onto a large screen at the front of the room. The 10 % or so of all astronomers who work in industry or in government labs usually come with classy-looking, professionally lettered viewgraphs. As for the others, provided that the astronomer's handwriting is not too bad, we tend to be very forgiving of the appearance of the transparency. A speaker is allowed 6 minutes before he or she is interrupted by a buzzer so that the 4-minute question and answer period can begin. After listening to the 8 or 10 talks that are usually given in one session, you may remember one or two of the talks vividly, while the rest may be jumbled together into a handful of unrelated facts. By the end of the conference, you will be very fortunate if you can still remember the few talks that most excited you at a particular session, much less the name of the astronomer that gave it. But not to worry. If you were really interested in what was said or presented, you can usually have the author send you a preprint at your home institution.
There were several poster papers describing the latest supercomputer simulations of hydrodynamical phenomena having to do with quasars and radio galaxies. These displays always draw a crowd because they include eye-catching, computer-generated videos showing how the super-hot, relativistic plasma is shot out of the galaxy's nucleus to form long narrow jets. These jets are a common feature of over 100 galaxies and quasars. By using theoretical models like the ones running on the supercomputers, we may eventually learn the details of just how the nuclei of distant quasars and radio galaxies produce these unique phenomena. I had given some thought to using a different set of hydrodynamical equations in a computer model to study how the filaments and plumes in the objects I was investigating are produced. I asked a number of questions about the computing set- up they were using in their simulations, and also inquired about the feasibility of collaborating with them on my particular problem. I was told, very politely, that the numerical computing code that does the simulation on the Cray supercomputer was not available to people outside their research group. They were also so backlogged with similar requests by other astronomers that it was really unlikely that they could help me out in the near future. It seems that if I want to get into the 'business' of hydro-simulations, it looks like I'll have to write my own programs. C'est la vie!
The exchanges between the speaker and members of the audience can sometimes lead to inadvertent humor: Theoretician 1: "I think we can get around that [problem], but let's talk about it later" Theoretician 2: "I don't" Theoretician 1: "That's why we should talk about it later" or, Theoretician : "The notation is consistent, it's just that 'R' doesn't mean the same as it did before" I think my all-time favorite has to be, Theoretician : "You can collapse and make stars on the back of an envelope"
At the end of the day, we again filed into the Civic Auditorium, this time to honor Simon White who received the prestigious Warner Prize for his work on simulating the growth of galaxy clusters based on computer calculations. While waiting for the lecture to start, it occurred to me that this is the auditorium where the Emmy Awards are handed out to TV stars. I couldn't help but wonder if Joan Collins or Lisa Hartman had sat in my chair last. Frank Drake introduced Simon by joking that 'all' he had done was to solve F = mg for a few hundred thousand particles. The point being that, though the equation is just a version of Newton's Law of Gravity, the hard part is solving it for 100,000 bodies in 3-dimensional space representing individual galaxies in our universe.
As I predicted, after a long day of listening to lectures my mind was a jumble of new ideas, numbers and images. In the midst of this mental maelstrom, a new thought slowly emerged, " I wonder who I can scare up to go out for dinner?" Returning to the exhibition area, I saw that caterers had already set-up a smorgasbord of finger foods for us to munch on, and the portable bars are serving their simple menus of alcholic beverages. I grabbed a rum-and-cola and a fistful of carrot sticks and joined the dense throng of people milling about the foyer.
Within a few minutes I ran into a group of former Harvard classmates. Although we now come from very different parts of the country, we all shared the same string of offices at Harvard between 1975 and 1982. We usually manage to set aside one night of socializing whenever we are at the same AAS meetings. Two years ago at the Charlottesville meeting we got together in a cramped motel room, filled the bathtub with ice and canned beer, and watched a baseball game on TV. Since then, Herman Marshall became an Assistant Professor at Berkeley, and Eric Feigelson is approaching his tenure review year at Pennslyvania State. Jim Brainerd is in his final years as a post-doc at Stanford wondering like all of us when we were at that stage in our careers, about where he will be next year. Times are tough in astronomy, and the competition is severe for the few available tenure-track positions.
The dinner party ended at 8:00 PM and we all returned to our hotel rooms to await the next day's talks. I slept until 15 minutes before Session 34 on 'Star Forming Regions' began. I dressed, shaved and rushed to the lecture hall, arriving just in time to get a comfortable seat up front moments before Annela Sargent from Caltech began her talk. In 5 minutes, she briskly reviewed for us her calculations and data which showed that the young star HL Tauri, about as big as our own sun, was surrounded by a disk of gas and dust 40 times as large as our solar system with enough mass to form hundreds of planets like Jupiter. Now, although I had been fast asleep less than 20 minutes ago, I knew that this was a really exciting piece of work; it made quite a splash in the newspapers too! For decades, stellar dynamicists have been telling us that as a cloud of gas collapses to become a star, it first forms into a rapidly rotating disk with a central bulge. The bulge eventually continues its collapse to become a star, while the orbiting disk is free to become a planetary system. In fact, this scenario has been used religiously by astronomers when describing in 'hand-waving terms' how a star is formed. In the last five years, quite a few of these 'circumstellar disk stars' have been discovered. In fact in 1983 the Infrared Astronomical Satellite identified over 25 nearby stars that may have not only circumstellar disks, but perhaps comets, asteriods, and even planets as well. Who knows, the next generation of space telescopes may well spot the feeble glimmerings of actual planets orbiting some of these stars!
While wandering around having another look at the new crop of posters in the exhibition area, I ran into a former student of mine from when I had been a Teaching Fellow at Harvard back in '77. Phil was now a graduate student in astronomy doing research for his Ph.D, and complaining about being a Teaching Fellow! What a small profession this is. You're constantly meeting up with people who used to be former students of yours, or people who used to be the professors for courses you took while you were an undergraduate. In a matter of a few years you find yourself learning new things about some topic in astronomy from a former student, or speaking to former professors you studied under, but this time as an equal rather than as a student. It's amazing to me how rapidly the cards are shuffled, and how quickly you have to adjust to new ways of interacting with former students and teachers alike.
About the only thing I recall from the next day's sessions was the Heineman Prize lecture, given by this year's recipient Hyron Spinrad who had been my adviser when I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. He is a world-renowned astronomer who has probably discovered more distant galaxies and quasars than anyone. He talked for an hour on the physical properties of distant galaxies and beguiled us all with pictures and spectra of possibly some of the youngest galaxies in the universe. One in particular, 3C326.1 at a redshift of 1.82 is evidently a large gas cloud 100 kiloparsecs in diameter which he considered a perfect candidate for a primeval galaxy.
It had been a very long day for me and I was delighted that it was drawing to a close in spite of all the exciting tidbits I had learned. By 8 PM I was more than ready to join three or four hundred other astronomers downstairs at the Holiday Inn 'Happy Hour'. A rock 'n roll band was blaring pop tunes in the background while the parquet floor teamed with energetic dancers. It was amusing to watch older astronomers in their tweed coats "getting down"; the music got me to reminiscing about my own experiences while at Harvard. By day, I had worked studiously on course assignments and research: endless hours of juggling equations, reading unfamiliar technical articles, and cramming for exams. But three nights a week, my dance partner and I would perform in disco competitions in Boston. Under revolving mirrored lights we would do the Latin Tango Hustle and forget about the daily tedium. Someone jostled my elbow, and in an instant, my attention returned to the present.
I woke at 7:30 AM. With the 'Today Show' droning on the TV in the background, I dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. Lost in my thoughts, I hardly tasted my eggs and toast, but silently wondered about my poster presentation. Who would seek me out? What questions would I be asked? Would my work be greeted with enthusiasm? At the exhibition area, there soon were a couple dozen of us standing in front of our assigned spaces in the poster area, thumb tacking our pictures, graphs and typed discussions onto bulletin boards for all to see. We did so in a single-minded silence. One last check to make sure that the display was as neat and striking as our professional modesty allowed. Some displays were hurriedly hand written perhaps the night before, others neatly typed. Illustrations of one kind or another were a main staple of each display. One good picture can act as a magnet to get people to look at your work. Since every astronomer has already scanned a hundred posters by the time he or she gets to yours, you need more than typed pages to make your presentation stand out. My favorite was the photo of a globular star cluster with all the stars numbered. Some patient astronomer had been searching for the handful of variable stars in that cluster among the hundreds of stable ones. Nearly every poster had a sign-up sheet below it so that interested parties could request preprints of the work on display.
As far as I could tell, my poster Comet-like Clouds at High Galactic Latitudes was well received. About three dozen people stopped by and looked it over, most of them asked me for 'preprints' of my work. That was a good sign. I also had a fascinating discussion with Loris Magnani, whose poster "The Kinematical Structure of High-Latitude Molecular Clouds" was on display across the aisle from mine. He and his collegues at Maryland have been conducting a survey of the sky searching for small dense molecular clouds located well above the plane of our galaxy. Many of the clouds turned out to be nearby clouds within a few hundred light years of the sun. I was interested in their research because, independently, I had discovered two of their clouds while examining the IRAS sky images at a wavelength of 100 micrometers. What was unusual about the clouds in my survey was that, at 100 micrometers, they looked like comets with filamentary plumes and streamers radiating from their dense core regions. This morphology had piqued my curiosity about the nature of these clouds and any other objects that might be related to them. For the next 30 minutes, Loris and I carried on a detailed conversation about these clouds while other astronomers quietly read our displays.
At long last, the meeting came to an end. The posters were taken down, and we all said our good-byes until the next meeting, which will be in Vancouver in June. With suitcase in hand, I took the shuttle bus back to LA and was soon homeward bound. I left feeling exhilarated and enthusiastic about the wonderful things I'd heard, first hand, about new discoveries and ideas. But, in my reverie on the plane, I recalled that I'd felt the same way at the last AAS meeting. Will I remember as pitifully little about what went on this time as I did about the last meeting? Unless you are familiar, on a daily basis, with a particular line of research, chances are, what you have heard about it may fade away faster than you would like. This is a common complaint among professional astronomers, and an unavoidable one in a world where even astronomy has become highly specialized. In my work, I will not need to think about OIII emission lines in 3C326.1, but I hope I will at least be able to remember that it is one of the first known candidates for a primeval galaxy. Ask me in two years!