“Transiting Planets” Conference by IAU in Boston MA, May 19-23, 2008
In the words of the Academy’s charter, enacted in 1780, the “end and design of the institution is…to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”
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Going on “as we speak”, with dates from May 19-23, 2008, the International Astronomical Union is located at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The detection and study of this new field of transiting planets has strongly emerged as a highly important research area, with expanding research on the extra-solar planets and its growth by the astronomy community.With the aim of the conference to stimulate interaction between the different programs on the transiting planet research, conducted all over the world, the conference actually expects to have the most recent observations confronted. According to the conference, large transit survey programs are announcing new detections on a regular basis, which trigger follow-up activities on a wide diversity—ranging from radial velocity measurements to HST and Spitzer observations.
The “Transmitting Planets” conference feels that the launch of the Corot and Kepler space missions will move the field of transmitting planets toward finding Earth-size planets. NASA’s Kepler mission consists of a space photometer being developed to search for extrasolar planets, observing the brightness of 10,000 stars over four years to detect a planet’s star transits. Meanwhile, the Corot is a space mission led by the French Space Agency with the European Space Agency. Corot has two objectives, with the number one searching for extrasolar planets. The second one is to perform asteroseismology by measuring solar-like oscillations in stars.
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has a history of 225 years, a history of making excellence and providing service to the nation and world. What has made this organization important is the fact that arts and sciences have been brought into play to the public and private sector leaders. Originally founded by John Hancock and John Adams, along with many other major American Revolutionary figures, the purpose of the Academy was to provide some sort of forum for selected scholars, members of the learned professions, with government and business leaders working together on behalf of the republic’s democratic interests.
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