The start of the 21st century was marked with the advent of all-sky surveys at all wavelengths, from radio to X-ray and Gamma-ray. Together with recent breakthroughs in large-volume ice neutrino detectors, and the successful detection of astrophysical gravitational waves, these pivotal advancements are giving rise to multi-messenger astrophysics setting the stage for new theoretical challenges. The goal of the conference is to review and discuss recent achievements in high energy astrophysics and cosmology in the context of these developments. The meeting will focus on astrophysics of compact objects on all mass scales, formation and growth of supermassive black holes, non-stationary and transient phenomena in the vicinity of compact objects and selected themes of physical cosmology. The physics of jets in blazars and gamma-ray bursts will be also addressed, exploring the mechanisms and consequences of these extreme events.

The topics covered at the meeting will include:

• Sky surveys from radio to X/gamma-ray bands
• Physics of AGN, QSO, blazars - clues from sky surveys
• TDEs and other extragalactic X-ray transients
• Gamma-ray bursts
• Spectral formation near compact objects - clues from X-ray spectroscopy and polarimetry
• Gravitational wave astronomy
• Neutrino astronomy
• Cosmic rays and ultra-high energy gamma-rays
• Sky surveys in cosmological context
• Future prospects/missions

For participants from Belarus, Iran, and Russia if you are unable to pay the registration fee or book your hotel with a credit card or bank transfer prior to the meeting, please inform us by writing to heacoss2024[AT]gmail[DOT]com. Such participants will have the option to pay the registration fee in cash at the registration desk upon arrival. Payments should be made in Armenian drams, according to the official exchange rate on the day of payment. If you require a hotel reservation, please inform us accordingly. However, please be advised that hotel room payments must be made upon arrival.

The registration fee collected from participants is utilized to cover the costs of the conference. As we do not have external funding for this meeting, it is crucial that registration fees are paid in full, preferably via bank transfer. We appreciate your understanding and cooperation.

For additional questions, please see the conference website.

The international conference "Hot Stars. Life with Circumstellar Matter" will take place on October 14&emdash;19, 2024, in the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, on campus of the Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. We intend to hold the conference live in a beautiful place located in the foothills of the Tien-Shan mountains that reach heights up to 5000 meters in the vicinity of the city. It is an astronomical site featuring the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, Tien-Shan and Assy-Turgen Astronomical Observatories.

The conference will focus on stellar objects at any evolutionary stage that include early-type stars with signs of circumstellar gaseous and dusty material. This definition includes such classes of object as Herbig Ae/Be, classical Be, Vega-type, Wolf-Rayet stars, Proto-Planetary Nebulae, Luminous Blue Variables, other objects with the B[e] phenomenon, and more. Exploration of the evolutionary connections between the mentioned classes leads to better understand the interaction between stellar systems and circumstellar matter and, ultimately, long-term evolution of galaxies. We encourage a broad community of scientists at all stages of their careers to share recent ideas, results, and discoveries and to communicate with each other in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere of a modern and vibrant city.

The Scientific Organizing Committee contains experienced researchers, who help organized conferences focused on topics around hot stars, mass loss, circumstellar material, and stellar evolution.

Invited talks will cover such topics as:

• Massive stars (theory and modeling)
• Stan Owocki (U. Delaware, USA) "Wind and eruptive Mass-Loss near the Eddington limit"
• Claus Leitherer (Space Telescope Science Inst.) “Integrated Properties of Massive Stellar Populations with the Latest Generation of Atmosphere and Evolution Model"
• Richard Ignace (East Tennessee State U., USA) "Spectropolarimetry for Discerning Geometry and Structure in Circumstellar Media."
• Andreas Sander (U. Heidelberg, Germany) "Studying hot stars and their winds with detailed stellar atmosphere models."
• Yu-Qing Lou (Tsinghua U., China) "Magnetized Supermassive Stars"
• Binary and Multiple Star systems with gaseous and dusty disks
• Hans Van Winckel (Katholieke U. Leuven, Belgium) "Post-AGB binaries and their dusty discs"
• Anatoly Miroshnichenko (U. North Carolina Greensboro, USA) "Searching for Binaries among Objects with the Be and B[e] Phenomenon"
• Daniela Korčáková (Charles U., Czech Republic) "Intermediate-Mass Mergers: A new scenario for several FS CMa stars"
• Marcelo Borges Fernandes (Obs. Nacional, Brazil) "The B[e] phenomenon and LBVs"
• Alex Lobel (Royal Obs. Belgium) "Multiplicity of Luminous Blue Variable Stars"
• Jaroslav Merc (Charles U., Czech Republic) "Symbiotic stars in the era of modern ground- and space-based surveys"
• Multiplicity of Classical Be stars

• Yael Nazé (U. Liege, Belgium) "Going forward to unveil the nature of γCas analogs"
• René Oudmaijer (U. Leeds, UK) "Binary Hypothesis for Be stars"

For additional questions, please see the conference website.

We plan to organize the international conference on "Transient Phenomena and Physical Processes Around Supermassive Black Holes" at the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute in Shanghai, China from October 15th to 18th, 2024.

The goal of the conference is to discuss the latest research on the dynamical processes and high-energy phenomena around supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. Topics include: tidal disruption events, quasi-periodic phenomena, stellar dynamics and accretion processes around SMBHs, EMRIs, binary SMBHs, and gravitational waves.

For additional questions, please see the conference website.

The Joint Space-Science Institute (JSI), a partnership between the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, will hold the 2024 JSI Workshop on The Formation and Early Evolution of Supermassive Black Holes, November 20-22nd, 2024. The workshop will be held at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, located in the Baltimore Inner Harbor, Baltimore, MD. This conference will bring together specialists from the astrophysics and physics community to discuss the latest observational results and theoretical models for the origin and early growth of supermassive black holes.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Theoretical models of supermassive black hole seeding
• Observations of the high-z universe
• Accretion-driven supermassive black hole growth and multi-wavelength signature: theory and observations.
• Merger-driven SMBH growth and Multi-messenger astrophysics
• Future Prospects

The workshop will focus on the production, astrophysical effects, and ongoing search for primordial black holes, which can account for all or part of dark matter and whose existence could have important astrophysical consequences. The subject has a strong overlap with scientific programs at Kavli IPMU, as it engages particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists, building on synergy of the multidisciplinary institute.

Invited Speakers:

Bernard Carr (Queen Mary, U. of London); Marcos Flores (ENS, Paris); Juan Garcia-Bellido (U of Madrid); Sarah Geller (UCSC); Anne Green (Nottingham University); Florian Kuhnel (U of Munchen); Sachiko Kuroyanagi (U of Madrid); Theodoros Papanikolaou (SSM, Naples); Zachary Picker (UCLA); Pi Shi (ITP, CAS); Sunao Sugiyama (U. Penn)

Organizing committee:

Misao Sasaki (Kavli IPMU)Masahiro Takada (Kavli IPMU); Masahiro Kawasaki (University of Tokyo); Alexander Kusenko (UCLA and Kavli IPMU)

For additional questions, please see the conference website.

The past few decades have seen a rapid increase in the number of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) discovered in the first billion years of the universe, thanks to ground-based wide-field surveys such as SDSS, Pan-Starrs1, DES, and HSC. These efforts have provided evidence that billion-solar-mass SMBHs existed in the early universe, challenging our understanding of the formation channels and early growth history of BH seeds.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has opened up new parameter spaces, revealing high-redshift analogs of Seyfert galaxies and resolving the starlight of quasar host galaxies. Anchored by these initial results, it is expected that a full census of SMBHs and host galaxies will be explored in the coming years, possibly reaching the seed BH mass range.

In this one-week conference, we propose to bring together experts from JWST and next-generation survey facilities such as Euclid, LSST, and Japan's Prime Focus Spectrograph to highlight ongoing efforts and future prospects for this research area.

This conference capitalizes on the unique research diversity of Kavli IPMU and the worldwide network of Kavli research institutes in astronomy and astrophysics.

The key topics of this conference are as follows:

• Discovery of high-redshift AGN at the observational frontiers
• Next-generation wide-field surveys and multi-wavelength facilities
• The role of obscuration in early SMBH growth
• The host galaxy and its large-scale environment
• Theoretical interpretation of early JWST results
• AGN as a transitional phase from starburst to quiescence

These two conferences are independently organized, but we aim to foster interaction between these two closely related fields. Participants are encouraged to join both conferences.

For additional questions, please see the conference website.

This year we celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the launch of the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the two and a half decades of science that have ensued. Chandra has been revolutionary for astronomy with its unprecedented and unparalleled sub-arcsecond angular resolution, its superb sensitivity to faint sources, and its high-resolution spectroscopy. This symposium will highlight and celebrate the discoveries made by Chandra, the unique capabilities of the mission, and the potential discoveries still remaining. Sessions topics will include:

• X-ray diagnostics of cosmic evolution
• The X-ray view of stellar evolution
• Exploring the cosmos with sky surveys, with a focus on the Chandra Source Catalog
• The sub-arcsecond revolution in X-ray astronomy
• Chandra synergies with current and future multi-wavelength missions

We are happy to announce to hold the MAXI 15 Year Workshop for the Time Domain Astronomy on December 10-12, 2024, at Nihon university, Tokyo Japan to celebrate the 15 years of successful operation of MAXI, or Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image, an X-ray all-sky monitor onboard the Japanese Experiment Module of the International Space Station.

In 1997, we organized the First MAXI Workshop at RIKEN entitled "All-Sky X-ray Observations of the Next Decade". From then, it took more than a decade for MAXI to start observing on orbit.Two decades later, time-domain astronomy is playing in the central arena of studies in the physics of the Universe, with MAXI watching the variable X-ray sky since August 15, 2009.

Currently, wide-sky discovery engines, like Swift, Fermi, EP and MAXI, provide the astrophysical transients to follow. Ground based facilities, such as ZTF and ATLAS, are also finding cornucopia of new sources to explore, augmented by recent additions of observatories for non-electromagnetic messengers, namely, gravitational waves and neutrinos.

For follow-up observations of these transients, telescopes with flexible scheduling capabilities are becoming more important. In space, telescopes on Swift, NuSTAR, NICER, and HXMT have been aggressively following transients. Automatic follow-up system on ISS, OHMAN, has been functioning. Small satellites such as GECAM and cubesats such as NinjaSat have been taking their unique roles. On the ground, small to medium sized telescopes such as GOTO are found to be very useful for these studies. Big observatories, both ground- or space-based, remain important in cases where sensitivities or high resolution are essential. Ground large quick telescope such as VLT/X-shooter, and GTC/ORISIS+ are very effective. Chandra with high positional resolution, XRISM with high energy resolution and IXPE and Polix with polarimeters are on orbit.

MAXI has been uniformly scanning the entire sky for the 15 years, and has been regularly reporting the discoveries to Astronomers Telegram and GCN; detections of outbursts of new or previously known X-ray sources including discoveries of 14 new galactic black holes binaries such as MAXI J1535-571, and MAXI J1820+070, a hundred of gamma-ray bursts, tens of giant stellar flares, and a couple of very rare phenomena, namely the relativistic tidal disruption event Swift J1644+57 and ultra luminous soft X-ray nova MAXI J0158-744. The accumulated scan data are processed to generate the 3MAXI catalogs of X-ray sources with 896 entries.

In this workshop, we hope to review the scientific results triggered by the MAXI observations. The topics include physics of high energy astrophysical sources, their emission, accretion, and outflow processes, in particular, those of black holes, neutron stars, and active stars. We also hope that this workshop will facilitate new research collaborations for the coming decade between theorists and observers at all wavelengths.

Invited speakers

• Jamie Kennea (Swift, USA)
• Sean Pike (NuSTAR, USA)
• Lian Tao (HXMT, China)
• Roger Romani (IXPE, Italy)
• Weimin Yuan (Einstein Probe, China)
• Bishwajit Paul (Polix, India)
• Jean-Luc Atteia (SVOM, France)
• Makoto Tashiro (XRISM, JAXA)
• Anna Ho (ZTF, USA)
• Keith Gendreau(TBD) (NICER, USA)

Koichi Wakata (astronaut, who mounted MAXI to JEM in orbit)

For additional questions, please see the conference website.

Save the Date! We are pleased to announce that the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) will host a workshop on transients and time-domain astronomy titled "Transients From Space" (TFS) on March 11-13, 2025 at STScI in Baltimore, MD.

Transient science is entering an exciting new era of discovery. The 2020 Decadal Survey named Time Domain Astronomy (TDA) as a top priority, and NASA's Physics of the Cosmos (PCOS) program has prioritized Time Domain And Multi-Messenger (TDAMM) astrophysics. New discoveries will be greatly impacted by space-based telescopes, including, but not limited to, HST, JWST, Swift, Fermi, TESS, Euclid, UVEX, ULTRASAT, LISA, and Roman. These telescopes probe new phase space in time, wavelength, and redshift, thereby opening up new sub-fields. This STScI workshop will explore novel research made possible by these telescopes and discuss how the community can optimize scientific output in the future. It will feature invited talks, contributed talks, posters, discussion panels, and fun social activities.

Our key objectives aim to:

• Highlight and build off successful science driven by space telescope data and policies;
• Uncover regions of overlap among telescopes and discuss opportunities for cross-mission synergies;
• Identify community needs for research and collaboration, particularly in the upcoming era of big data;
• Optimize future space-based observations for the entire community.

• Early-Time Observations: SNe Ia, Fast Transients, Shock Breakout
• High-Energy Transients: GRBs, GW
• Progenitors: pre-explosion variability, stellar evolution
• Infrared Transients: dust, SNRs, echoes, TDEs, AGN
• High-z Transients: Lensed SNe, extreme explosions (SLSNe, PISNe), TDEs, AGN
• Survey Science: Euclid, Roman, UVEX, Big Data
• Theory of explosive transients and compact objects

Co-Chairs

Ori Fox (STScI), Armin Rest (STScI), Suvi Gezari (STScI), Lou Strolger (STScI)

SOC Members

Jennifer Andrews (Gemini Observatory), Ori Fox (STScI; Chair), Suvi Gezari (STScI; Co-Chair), Isobel Hook (Lancaster University), Rebekah Hounsell (GSFC), Patrick Kelly (University of Minnesota), Takashi Moriya (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan), Robert Quimby (San Diego State University), Armin Rest (STScI; Co-Chair), Lou Strolger (STScI; Co-Chair), Tea Temim (Princeton), Yossef Zenati (JHU/STScI)

LOC Members

Ori Fox, Suvi Gezari, Sherita Hanna, Victory Ramnarine, Armin Rest, Shemiah Smith, Lou Strolger Confirmed Invited Speakers

Federica Bianco (Delaware/Rubin), Azalee Bostroem (Arizona), Maria Teresa Botticella (INAF), Brad Cenko (Goddard), Wenlei Chen (OK State), Kishalay De (Columbia University/CCA/Flatiron Institute), Maria Drout (Toronto), Saurabh Jha (Rutgers), Josefin Larsson (KTH), Julie McEnery (Goddard), Brian Metzger (Columbia University/CCA/Flatiron Institute), Jeremy Perkins (Goddard), Justin Pierel (STScI), Ben Rose (Baylor), Melissa Shahbandeh (STScI), Nao Suzuki (LBL), Qinan Wang (MIT), Yuhan Yao (Berkeley)

Please visit our webpage for details, including upcoming deadlines.

When the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched on November 20, 2004, its prime objective was to chase Gamma-Ray Bursts. Since then, the mission has far exceeded its original scientific goals. Swift discovered the first afterglows and host galaxies of short-hard GRBs, and a growing sample of events from the local Universe to the epoch of reionization, providing arcsecond positions, light curves, and spectra for more than 1,500 events.

Over time, Swift has become an unequalled Target of Opportunity machine for the astronomical community, thanks to a unique combination of sensitive instrumentation and operational flexibility that provides unprecedented observational capabilities: rapid response coupled with multi-wavelength monitoring of any class of transient/variable object.

After almost 20 years of operations, we think it a fitting occasion to revisit Swift's achievements and to put our mission in the context of the rapidly evolving fields of time-domain and multi-messenger astrophysics. Therefore, we are organizing the meeting "Celebrating 20 years of Swift Discoveries", to be held on March 24-28, 2025, in Florence, Italy, at the Firenze Fiera conference center.

Please mark your calendar to save the date!

Please visit our webpage for details, including upcoming deadlines.

The unparalleled near-infrared capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) allow us to study distant galaxies in remarkable detail. This has ushered in a new era of galaxy evolution studies. With new knowledge of the properties of the stars, gas and dust that make up these early galaxies, we can now start to gain insights into the physical processes driving the assembly of the earliest galaxies, and how they evolve into their lower redshift descendants.

This conference will be an opportunity to highlight recent observational and theoretical results shedding new light on the detailed properties of the stellar populations and interstellar medium (ISM) of galaxies through the early phases of cosmic history. It will also serve as a forum for discussing how new JWST results are transforming our understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies from early times through to the present day.

Scientific Focus:

• Nature of stellar populations in distant galaxies
• Properties of the interstellar medium across redshifts
• Chemical enrichment and build-up of dust across cosmic time
• Spatially resolved studies of galaxies and their environments
• Impact of galaxies on cosmic reionization
• How can simulations and theory help interpret the latest observations
• Feedback and regulating galaxy growth

Rebecca Bowler (Manchester); Andy Bunker (Oxford, co-chair); Alex Cameron (Oxford, co-chair); Emma Curtis-Lake (Hertfordshire); Richard Ellis (UCL); Laura Pentericci (INAF-Rome); Aayush Saxena (Oxford, co-chair); Stephen Wilkins (Sussex)

LOC:

Kit Boyett; Andy Bunker; Alex Cameron; Leanne O'Donnell; Gareth Jones; Aayush Saxena

For additional questions, please see the conference website.

The International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation is organised every three years under the guidance of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. It is the principal international meeting for scientists working in all areas of relativity and gravitation.

The Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves is organised every two years under the guidance of the Gravitational Wave International Committee. It is the principal international meeting for scientists working in all areas of gravitational-wave science.

In 2025, the 24th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR24) and the 16th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves (Amaldi16) will be held together as a joint meeting, bringing together experts from across classical and quantum gravity, mathematical and applied relativity, gravitational-wave instrumentation and data-analysis, and multimessenger astronomy.

The GR24-Amaldi Meeting will be held as a primarily in-person event at the Scottish Event Campus, Glasgow. Online resources will be made freely available after the event. Meeting organisation is led by the Institute for Gravitational Research at the University of Glasgow and the Institute of Physics.

For additional questions, please see the conference website.