The traditional 5-a-side football tournament will be held in the QUB PE Centre on Tuesday 1^st April, 19:00-22:00.Dave Jess will be organizing the tournament, in collaboration with well known QUB Astronomers Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, and Ronaldinho. Team manager will be our new PDRA, Jose Mourinho.

To register your team for the competition, please consult the dedicated web pages.

Remember, it’s not a matter of life and death - it’s much more important than that!

[from the Official NAM Website]

The Conference Dinner will be held on Wednesday 2^nd April in the Great Hall at Galgorm Manor, about 30 minutes from Belfast City Centre. Coaches will depart from Queen’s at 18:00 and 18:30. The cost of attending the Conference Dinner will be £30 per person. Delegates may register to bring a guest with them.

[from the Official NAM Website]

Canada Room, Council Chambers, Naughton Gallery, Black and White Hall and Naughton Gallery.

All delegates are invited to attend a buffet and drinks reception on the ground and first floors of the Lanyon Building. This part of the University houses the Naughton Gallery, one of the premier art galleries in Northern Ireland. Entrance is through the main doors of the Lanyon building.

There is no charge to conference delegates for attending this event.

[from the Official NAM Website]

Black Hole Feedback in Cool Core Clusters
Andy Fabian (University of Cambridge)

TBA

The Pan-STARRS Project
Nick Kaiser (Institute for Astronomy, Hawaii)
TBA.

Cosmic Vision - Where We are Now, Where we Go
David Southwood (European Space Agency)
A description of current status of the ongoing ESA Programme in Science and Robotic Exploration will be given. Then there will be a review of the prospects for the next 20 years following the selection of and the commencement of studies on an array of new missions.

Looking for life beyond the Earth
Monica Grady (Open University)

TBA

New insights into magnetic energy release processes
Alan Title (Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research)
The new observational capability of Solar Optical Telescope on the Hinode satellite has illustrated the prevalence of wave motions in the chromosphere and corona and the constant emergence of magnetic flux everywhere on the solar surface. New models of flux emergence and reconnection with previously existing fields provides a scenario for the nearly continuous transfer of turbulent kinetic energy in the subsurface convection to wave and ohmic heating of the upper photosphere, chromosphere and corona

The Solar Optical Telescope on Hinode has a focal plane package that contains a version of the High Altitude Observatory’s Advance Stokes Polarimeter (ASP), a 80 milli-angstrom bandpass tuneable filter, and a set of 5 to 8 angstrom filters. The imaging section records data on a 2048 x 4096 CCD detector. The 50 cm telescope and the focal plane package are diffraction limited and structures as small as 0.2 arc second (150 km on the Sun) can be resolved. The ASP can make polarization measurements with a precision of 3 parts in 10,000. By limiting the field of view image rates of better than 10 per minute can be achieved. This new data is providing a clearer picture of the processes associated with flux emergence from the scale of active regions to granules, and the presence of both longitudinal and transverse fields nearly everywhere on the solar surface.

This talk will discuss and illustrate some of the new discoveries.

Measuring Cosmic Acceleration
Brian Schmidt (Australian National University)
In 1998 two teams presented evidence of an accelerating Universe by tracing the cosmic expansion to more than 1/2 the age of the Universe using a class of exploding stars known as type Ia supernovae. In the ensuing decade the weight of experimental evidence has accumulated such that the standard model of the Universe now includes a component of matter with negative pressure (commonly referred to as Dark Energy) driving the acceleration. But the physical nature of what is causing the acceleration is still a mystery, with no compelling theoretical explanation yet available. To help differentiate the broad classes of models for understanding the acceleration, huge observational projects have been put into motion to more precisely measure the cosmic expansion rate back in time. A decade after its discovery, supernovae still provide the most constraining measurements of the cosmic acceleration phenomenon, but other measurement techniques are rapidly being developed and refined. I will discuss the evidence and constraints on cosmic acceleration, focusing on type Ia supernovae, but including a wide variety of techniques. In addition, I will critically look at what the next 5-10 years of experiments are likely to achieve at clarifying the mystery of an accelerating Universe.

The Search for Exoplanets
Don Pollacco (Queen’s University Belfast)
Since the first extra-solar planets were discovered more than a decade ago the subject has grown rapidly. While it is true to say planet discovery still dominates efforts, observations have become or will soon become sufficiently sophisticated to test models of planet structure and evolution.

In this talk we will discuss the current and planned ground/space based missions designed to discover and characterise extra-solar planets – emphasising the drive towards SuperEarths in the habitable zone.

First Light to the Milky Way: Progress and Challenges in Galaxy Evolution
Richard Ellis (University of Oxford)

Through deep panchromatic surveys with ground and space-based observatories, much progress has been made in tracing the global history of star formation and mass assembly from redshift 6 to the present day. This has been accompanied by detailed predictions from extensive simulations which incorporate the effects of various forms of feedback. Challenges remain in understanding how and when the first galactic sources formed, in inter-relating the diversity of star forming, dusty and quiescent galaxies seen at most epochs, and in defining the processes which govern the subsequent growth of massive galaxies.

Monday 31^st March 2008 is reserved for registration at the meeting. The scientific sessions will run from 9am Tuesday 1^st April to 5pm Friday 4^th April.