LISA Data 2005 Summer Workshop at Aspen

Just in from the APS TGG.

LISA Data: Analysis, Sources, and Science
Aspen Center for Physics 2005 Summer Workshop, May 29 - Jun 18 2005

''The goal of this workshop is to bring together members of the astrophysics community, the gravitational wave detector community, and the data analysis community to stimulate discussions and understanding of the astrophysics that can be done using gravitational radiation.'' The organizers are Benacquista, Finn, Kalogera, and Vecchio.

www.astro.northwestern.edu/AspenS05/index.html

arXiv watch: Cole Miller

Cole Miller has a new (well, Sep 14) preprint on ``Probing general relativity with mergers of supermassive and intermediate-mass black holes'' (astro-ph/0409331).

Imagining Future GW Astronomy at Penn State

Various GW info channels have reported the announcement for a workshop on the future of GW astronomy at the Center For Gravitational Wave Physics, Penn State University, on October 27-30, 2004. Fearless of redundancy, we add our voice to the choir. The workshop will bring together GW astronomers with astronomers from allied fields to discuss the development and the sociology of GW astronomy in the next twenty years, and on.

Matters of Gravity

The new issue of the APS TGG's newsletter Matters of Gravity includes a report by Curt Cutler on the 5th LISA Symposium. Thanks to Jorge Pullin for editing the always informative MOG.

Introducing the LISA Science Blog

Welcome! This is the LISA Science Blog, a forum to collect news, sightings, announcements, offers, and other items of interest for the research community centered around LISA.

Examples of possible blog items include:
- the interesting new paper at gr-qc/xxyyzzz
- a news and views item on NASA policy in Nature, on in the NY Times
- the initial announcement of a GW conference in France
- a request for comment on a technical issue (RFCs, what a venerable tradition)

How the LISA Science Blog differs from other existing channels that discuss GW news
- it is extremely informal, and therefore fast; the emphasis is on rapid communication rather than polish
- it allows discussion, by way of comments
- it encourages redundancy: by drawing the attention of readers to useful items elsewhere in the media, it potentially saves them the time of monitoring all those other channels
- it is meant to have a bandwidth of several messages a week, but it can be read selectively using RSS feed readers
- it is supposed to be useful, not beautiful (but the look will improve a bit in the future)

The initial core team of authors include Michele Vallisneri, Massimo Tinto, John Armstrong, Karen Willacy, Bonny Schumaker (all at JPL), Joan Centrella, John Baker (both at GSFC), Shane Larson (PSU), Scott Hughes (MIT), and Neil Cornish (Montana). We welcome all additions to this team (e-mail Michele).

All postings in the LISA Science Blog represent only the opinions of the authors, and not those of the LISA Project or of any of the institutions involved in LISA.