Meeting Announcement

The Nature and Evolution of Disks Around Hot Stars

July 7-9, 2004

Venue: Johnson City, Tennessee, USA
E-mail: hotstars at mail.etsu.edu

A workshop on disks around hot stars is being planned for 2004 July 7-9, to be hosted by East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee, with meetings to be held at the Carnegie Hotel.

Scientific Information

Disks are an important, sometimes even dominant, feature of many astrophysical sources, including massive hot stars. Studies of these disks are often constrained by narrow categories of objects, while the key physical principles for understanding the disks in different systems can be quite similar. This workshop is intended to focus discussion on the major outstanding questions surrounding the structure, formation, and evolution of disks around hot stars, and to foster communication between different areas of disk research. With a balanced menu of observational and theoretical presentations, review talks will highlight recent results and key physical principles relating to these topics. In keeping with the workshop theme, substantial time will be allocated for discussion, both in a moderated large group setting and in the casual formation of smaller circles of participants. The intended outcome of this event is the synthesis of the latest observational data and theoretical tools to stimulate fresh approaches for this interesting and growing topic of relevance for massive stars.

Meeting Format

We have developed a novel format for the meeting. For each day there will be four invited talks in the morning, with a discussion session in the early afternoon. A "Focus" session will be held later in the afternoon, for which attendance will be optional.

Our goal is twofold: first, to provide review talks to summarize the current understanding of hot star disks and set the stage for discussion (the three sessions being "The Properties of Hot Star Disks", "The Star-Disk Connection", and "Magnetic Fields in Massive Stars"). A lunch break will provide a period of time for informal discussion, after which participants will gather for a moderated discussion led by a panel. The Focus sessions are more narrowly defined and are intended to be somewhat tutorial in nature, on the topics of Diagnostic Methods (headed by David Cohen and Margaret Hanson), Modeling Tools (headed by Ken Gayley and John Porter), and Optical/IR Interferometry (headed by Doug Gies and Philippe Stee).

The workshop format is thus built around a relatively small number of review talks, with plenty of time for interaction, in hopes of achieving a kind of "summer school" flavor. We would like participants to come away with a deeper understanding of the key issues and with new ideas for attacking the outstanding questions surrounding hot star disks. We hope to stimulate new collaborations and working partnerships for further progress in this area.