Gaia-PESSTO scientific workshop Queen's University Belfast, UK, 5-7 February 2014

Gaia-PESSTO scientific workshop

Queen's University Belfast, UK, 5-7 February 2014

Gaia will be ESA's milestone astrometric mission, and is due for launch in the near future. Gaia will repeatedly map the whole sky, and will find many transient events, including thousands of supernovae. Getting ready for this influx of Gaia data is now timely.

This workshop will bring together the key European groups investigating supernovae, both in understanding the physics of the objects, and their use as probes of the nearby Universe and for cosmology. The meeting will focus on the significant impact that Gaia will shortly have in revealing a significant yield of thousands of newly discovered supernoave, generating statistically significantly samples of hitherto rare events, such as super-luminous supernovae. The workshop will be a key milestone in the organisation of the follow-up and exploitation of the Gaia supernovae, where scientific and operational priorities will be agreed. The workshop will lead to the development of a specific 'Gaia supernova roadmap' defining the follow-up campaign to ensure maximal scientific return from the Gaia supernova sample.

Thanks to support from the Gaia Research for European Astronomy Training (GREAT) networking programme, we are able to provide limited funding for participation in the workshop for students and early career researchers (within 5 years of PhD). There will be no registration fee for any participant.

The registration and call for contributed talks is now open on the PESSTO wiki pages: https://sites.google.com/a/pessto.org/wiki/pessto-wiki/pessto-meetings/gaia---pessto-great-esf-workshop and closes on December 15th. There is the opportunity for a limited number of contributed talks and there will also be space available for posters. The total number of participants is capped at 45.

SOC

Mark Sullivan (University of Southampton, UK; Chair)
Stephen Smartt (Queen's University Belfast, UK; LOC Chair)
Michel Dennefeld (IAP, Paris, France)
Xavier Luri (University of Barcelona, Spain)
Seppo Mattila (Tuorla Observatory, Turku, Finland)
Ferdinando Patat (ESO, Germany)
Nancy Elias de la Rosa (IEEC, Barcelona, Spain)
Massimo Turatto (Observatory of Trieste, INAF, Trieste, Italy)
Nicholas A Walton (IoA, Cambridge, UK)
Wolfgang Hillebrandt (MPA, Germany)