Saturday, July 7, 2018

July Astrobite: Summarizing the ASA Meeting

My Astrobite for July came out yesterday, a short summary of the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) meeting last week. Well, I say “short,” but as it's not a normal paper summary I allowed myself another hundred words or so beyond the usual thousand-word-limit. I think there were a hundred and forty talks total, so to summarize I just picked one from each day from a range of topics and by people from different universities. Even then I didn't have room to cover some of the things that came up such as a good number of talks about radio astronomy which covered things like using measurements of pulsar timing across the Milky Way to make a very sensitive gravitational wave detector on a galactic scale.

One thing I did notice over the course of last week, though, was that there weren't any other talks or posters related to my area of research in varying constants. There were quite a few areas where there were multiple talks/posters on similar subjects (like gravitational waves, or pulsar timing, or the challenges of big data), but nobody else presenting anything like what I'm doing. (That I saw at least; there were parallel session each afternoon of which I could only watch one, but from reading the talk titles I don't think I missed anything obviously related.) Certainly there are other people working in this area, but it was interesting to have presented what felt like a pretty unique talk. Anyway, that's enough for now or I'll end up writing another thousand-word summary. A hui hou!

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