IAU Commission 30: Radial velocities Newsletter February 2003 Dear members and consultants of IAU Commission 30, This newsletter is my first attempt to communicate directly with all Commission members since I took up the functions of President in 2000. The following issues are covered below: 1. Commission 30 web page and Triennial Report for 2000-2002 2. Commission 30 membership 3. Elections of the new Organizing Committee for the period 2003-2006 4. Meetings supported by the Commission 30 5. 9-th Catalog of Spectroscopic Binary Orbits: progress report 6. New database on binary Cepheids 7. The future of Commission 30 Please, look at the IAU web site and check the deadlines for the coming 25-th General Assembly in Sydney: http://www.iau.org/IAU/News/deadlines.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Commission 30 web page and Triennial Report for 2000-2002 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Nowadays Internet is the main vehicle for information exchange and dissemination. Please, have a look at the C30 web page at URL: http://www.ctio.noao.edu/science/iauc30/iauc30.html and make your comments and suggestions regarding its contents and desirable improvements. The Triennial Report for the period 2000-2002 has been submitted to the IAU secretariat, to be published in the IAU Transactions Vol. 25A. The Report is available on our web page. I also provide an extended version of this report where each reference can be "clicked" to read the abstract (via ADS services). It is my hope that such an extended report is more useful than pure text. Look at the URL: http://www.ctio.noao.edu/science/iauc30/C30rep.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Commission 30 membership ---------------------------------------------------------------- Commission 30 has 129 members and consultants in 28 countries. We are a small Commission by IAU standards. Given that radial velocities are actively used nowadays in astronomical research (especially in extra-solar planets and stellar oscillation fields), many more astronomers can join C30. Please, look around you and suggest to your colleagues (who are not yet members of C30) to join us! It is particularly important to involve young people. The future of C30 depends on the new members, of course. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Elections of the new Organizing Committee for the period 2003-2006 ---------------------------------------------------------------- IAU Commission 30 (radial velocities) has an organizing committee of 8 members who are elected for terms of six years. Every three years four of these 8 retire, and 4 new OC members must be elected (see the Rules for election on our web page). The current OC is: President (2000-2003): Andrei Tokovinin (CTIO, Chile, atokovinin@ctio.noao.edu) Vice-president (2000-2003): Brigitta Nordstrom (Copenhagen, birgitta@astro.ku.dk) Organizing committee: serving until 2006: Dainis Dravins (Lund Observatory, Sweden, dainis@astro.lu.se) Hugo Levato (El Leoncito, Argentine, hlevato@casleo.gov.ar) Laszlo Szabados (Konkoly Obs., Hungary, szabados@konkoly.hu) Myron A. Smith (CSC/IUE Observatory, USA, msmith@nebula.gsfc.nasa.gov) serving until 2003: Tsevi Mazeh (Wise Observatory, Israel, mazeh@wise7.tau.ac.il) Nidia Morell (Univ. la Plata, Argentina, nidia@fcaglp.fcaglp.unlp.edu.ar) Hernan Qintana (U. Catolica, Chile, hquintan@astro.puc.cl) Stephane Udry (Geneva Obs., Switzerland, stephane.udry@obs.unige.ch) The duties of those on the OC of Comm. 30 are quite light. Almost all business is conducted by email, and typically this is limited to commenting on a number of proposals that come up for new conferences from time to time, and occasionally commenting or advising on scientific matters. The committee works under a president (myself, about to retire and be replaced by the current vice-president, Dr. Brigitta Nordstrom). A nominating Committee consisting of myself, Brigitta Nordstrom and John Hearshaw (former President) will nominate the candidates for the four new OC members and vice-president (who will normally become President for the triennial 2003-2006) and will organize the elections in April-May 2003. Broad geographical coverage of OC is desirable. Please, do not hesitate to suggest any candidates for the Commission vice-president and the vacant positions on the OC! ---------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Meetings supported by the Commission 30 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Support for the IAU-sponsored scientific meetings is one of the major activities of the Commission OC. Unusually high number of requests was received for 2003, the year of IAU GA. Meetings in 2003 supported by C30: 1. IAU Colloquium 191 "The environment and evolution of binary and multiple stars" (Merida, Mexico, February 3-7 2003). 2. IAU Symposium "Large Scale Surveys, Stellar and Galactic Astronomy" 3. Joint Discussion on "Solar-like oscillations: observations and theory" 4. Joint Discussion on determinations of stellar masses Meetings in 2003 for which the C30 support was requested, but not granted: 1. JD Metal-Poor Carbon-Enhanced Stars in the Early Galaxy (weakly related to C30 activity). 2. Symposium on International Virtual Observatory (no relation to C30 activities, request too late). 3. Symposium on Future ground and space-based astronomical telescope systems (no relation to C30 activities, request too late). So far, two requests for 2004 meetings support by Commision 30 have been received. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 5. 9-th Catalog of Spectroscopic Binary Orbits: progress report ---------------------------------------------------------------- A Working Group to prepare a new catalog of spectroscopic binary orbits (SB9) has been created in Manchester. This internet-based catalog is already in existence, look at: http://sb9.astro.ulb.ac.be For the time being (February 1, 2003), SB9 contains 1762 systems (1469 in SB8); 361 systems have RVs; 1822 orbits (1469 in SB8). A total of 113 papers have been added since August 2000. Actually SB9 receives some 400 queries per month. This means that the catalog is useful and is actually being used by the community. Major work to input the information to SB9 is still to be done, however. Even some members of the WG did not yet submitted their own orbits. I invite the members of C30 to look into their own archives for files with orbital elements and radial velcities (yes, SB9 does contain individual radial velocity measurements) and to send them to Dimitri Pourbaix or myself. Processing of electronic data (as opposed to data on paper) will assure a minimum of errors and a speedy input to SB9. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 6. New database on binary Cepheids ---------------------------------------------------------------- An electronically accessible database on the binaries among classical Cepheid variables has been recently compiled by Dr. L. Szabados. It contains data and bibliography on 150 Cepheid binaries, mostly spectroscopic. The URL of the database is http://www.konkoly.hu/CEP/intro.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- 7. The future of C30 ---------------------------------------------------------------- I want to touch here a sensitive issue of the Commission's future. It is clear from our Triennial Reports that vigorous and diverse research involving radial velocity techniques is being pursued by the astronomical community. Our Commission did contribute very substantially by promoting the exchange of information and by perfectioning the observational techniques and standards. New working definition of the radial velocity is a recent example of such contribution, see http://www.ctio.noao.edu/science/iauc30/C30rep.html#SECT2.1 We are, de facto, a Commission on STELLAR radial velocities, despite the declared coverage of all regions of electromagnetic spectrum where Doppler effect can be used. Massive measurements of the galaxy redshifts apparently go well without our support, just as radial velocities measured in the radio range. Until now there was a clearly defined job for C30, namely developing the new methods of radial velocity measurement. This is now practically done, culminating in the IAU Colloquium on precise radial velocities in Victoria (1998). What shall we do within next 3-6 years? We are formally united by the use of Doppler effect, which might seem not a sufficient justification for a Commission's existence. I invite the members of C30 to express their thoughts on how to make C30 more useful and active. Shall we merge with some other Commissions? Shall we limit ourselves to stellar velocities or, on the contrary, try to be more active in other areas? What meetings need we to organize within coming 3 years? I believe that positive and proactive attitude to the future of C30 is very much needed now. Dr. Andrei Tokovinin, President IAU Commission 30 atokovinin@ctio.noao.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------