UCLan has been selected to run a world-leading astrophysics conference: the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Symposium 284.
The symposium was proposed by UCLan’s Dr Cristina Popescu jointly with Dr R
ichard Tuffs from the Max Planck Institute fuer Kernphysik (MPI-K) in Heidelberg, Germany.
The conference will be held at UCLan between 5 and 9 September 2011. It will be sponsored by the IAU which has about 10,000 members in over 90 different countries.
2011 will see UCLan at the focal point of the international astrophysical community. This is one of only about 10 IAU conferences awarded each year, worldwide and not many places ever get to hold two of these in a lifetime. The IAU has selected and sponsored 400 such conferences in 30 different countries since their symposia started 57 years ago. Only seven UK institutions have ever held two or more of these.
In the last 10 years, only two institutions in the UK have been given the privilege of running two IAU conferences – the University of Oxford and now UCLan.
Professor Gordon Bromage, Director of UCLan’s Jeremiah Horrocks Institute, commented: “This is a real coup for us. We have held one of these IAU conferences before, in connection with the Transit of Venus, in 2004. That was the most phenomenal, moving, and spectacularly successful conference we have ever experienced – we had front page main headlines in the Times for example. Scientifically this conference will be even more prestigious and will definitively bring UCLan into the headlines.”
The subject of the IAU symposium is “The spectral energy distribution of galaxies”. Dr Popescu added: “This conference is born of our vision to link the galaxies’ signature coming from all regions of the electromagnetic spectrum from X-rays to radio waves to dissect the inner workings of galaxies. The IAU has recognised that this challenge can only be addressed at the scale of a full IAU symposium.”
Dr Popescu and Dr Tuffs will be chairing the Scientific Organising Committee and Professor Bromage will be managing the conference overall and chairing the local organising committee, jointly composed of staff from UCLan and MPI-K.
The Scientific Organising Committee of the conference consists of 14 leading scientists from United Kingdom, France, Italy, Greece, United States, Australia, South Africa, Russian Federation, China, Japan and Venezuela.
The conference is coordinated by the Division VIII of the IAU, ‘Galaxies & the Universe’. At the same time as many as five other divisions and commissions of the IAU are supporting the conference (Division VI Interstellar Matter, Division VII Galactic System, Division X Radio Astronomy and Division XI Space & High Energy Astrophysics, Commission 21 Galactic and Extragalactic Backgrounds) cementing the interdisciplinary nature and large breath of the proposed conference.