Astrobites@Long Beach: Live Blogging, Posters, Booths, and More!

Hello everyone, and welcome from Long Beach California, site of the 221^st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).  Just as we did for Austin and Anchorage last year, we will be suspending our regular posts for the next four days in order to live blog exciting new results from the conference.  This is the fifth consecutive AAS meeting at which we have had an official presence, and it should be bigger and better than ever, with a whooping 14 astrobiters in attendance!

We will have plenty in store for you over the next four days as we attend press conferences, talks, and poster sessions.  We thank AAS President David Helfand and AAS Press Officer Rick Feinberg for again inviting us to attend the press conferences. Our goal is to follow a similar format to Austin and Anchorage, posting two articles a day (one each morning and afternoon) that are continuously updated with short summaries and press report announcements.  However, as I’m sure many of you have noticed, we have been experiencing some server difficulties over the past few weeks.  So, make sure you follow us on both twitter and facebook as well!  If the website it down we will post all of our live blogs on facebook.

If you are here at the meeting itself make sure you come check us out at the following locations:

• The Undergraduate Orientation Sunday night from 6:00 – 7:00 pm in the Conference Center.  If you are lucky you could win an astrobties T-shirt!
• The AstroBetter and Astrobites Booth in the Poster Room.  This is the first time we have had a booth at a AAS meeting so stop by throughout the meeting to get some cool astrobites swag!
• The Astrobites Poster: #255.11 on Tuesday from 9:00am – 6:30pm

In addition, the following astrobites authors are giving scientific presentations at the meeting:

MONDAY

Nick Hand: Talk 105.03: New Results from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT): The Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect
Caroline Morley: Talk 126.05: The Effect of Clouds and Hazes on the Transmission Spectrum of GJ 1214b, 2:50PM-3:00PM

TUESDAY

Astrobites Poster! (led by Maria Drout): 255.11: The Astro-ph Reader’s Digest for Undergraduates
Courtney Dressing: Talk 216.06: The Occurrence Rate of Small Planets Around Cool Stars from Kepler, 11:15AM-11:30AM
Dan Gifford: Talk 226.04: Observing the Gravitational Potential Profiles of Galaxy Clusters, 2:30PM-2:40PM
Jessica Donaldson: Talk 220.04: Spatially Resolved HST STIS Spectroscopy of the HD32297 Debris Disk, 2:40PM-2:50PM
Elizabeth Lovegrove: Poster 253.18: Very Low Energy Supernovae from Neutrino Mass Loss
Kim Phifer: Poster 254.04: Keck Observations of a Proposed Gas Cloud in the Galactic Center
Justin Vasel: Poster 253.25: The Helium and Lead Observatory and the Supernova Early Warning System

WEDNESDAY

Betsy Mills: Talk 332.06D: A New View of Molecular Gas in the Galactic Center, 3:10PM-3:30PM
Shannon Hall: Poster 343.09: Detecting Exoplanet Atmospheres from 2-m Ground-Based Telescopes
Ben Montet: Poster 343.23: Model-Independent Stellar and Planetary Masses from Multi-Transiting Exoplanetary Systems

THURSDAY

Chris Faesi: Poster 440.05: Molecular Cloud-Scale Star Formation in External Galaxies: NGC 300
Lauren Weiss: Talk 407.05: The Relation Between Radius, Mass, and Incident Flux of Exoplanets, 11:00AM-11:10AM

• About the Author

About Maria Drout

I am currently a Hubble, Carnegie-Dunlap Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, CA and an associate of the Dunlap Institute in Toronto, ON. I recently received my PhD from the Harvard University Department of Astronomy, and was previously based both at the University of Cambridge (M.A.St.) and the University of Iowa (B.S.). My research focuses on understanding the evolution and death of massive stars, and the origin of unusual astronomical transients.