Past Events in 2019

​This is a past event. View and download the presentations given at the 2019 Winter AAS SOFIA Workshop by selecting the links below. The Cookbook Recipes used in the workshop may be found here.
SETUP+ [pdf]
FORCAST [pdf]

Due to impacts to the aircraft’s schedule, all tours scheduled for Monday, January 7-Wednesday, January 9, are cancelled.

AAS attendees will have the opportunity to tour the SOFIA aircraft and learn more about the observatory at Boeing Field, six miles away from the Washington State Convention Center. Tickets may be obtained at the SOFIA booth in the AAS exhibit hall. The tour is open to registered AAS guests. Non-U.S. citizens must provide proof of citizenship. 

This session brings together the latest studies of magnetic fields in star forming regions and the galactic environment, with a goal of better understanding the role of magnetic fields shaping interstellar matter into the observed filaments, funneling atoms and molecules to enhance star formation efficiencies, and supporting clouds against collapse. 

SOFIA provides the international community with open access to mid- and far-infrared observations with a broad range of instruments, as well as a unique platform for instrument and technology development. 

The Town Hall will discuss several important new developments for the observatory including: 

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are believed to be ubiquitous in space therefore represent an important class of molecules for the field of astrochemistry. PAHs are relatively stable under interstellar conditions, account for a significant fraction of the known universe’s molecular carbon inventory, and are believed responsible for numerous telltale interstellar infrared emission bands. PAHs can be subdivided into numerous subclasses, including Hydrogenated PAHs (Hn-PAHs).

We have performed a 5-8 μm spectral line survey of the hot molecular core associated with the massive protostar AFGL 2591, using SOFIA/EXES. We have supplemented these data with a ground based study around 4.5 μm using the iSHELL instrument, and 8-13 μm using TEXES, on the IRTF. We present the first detection of ro-vibrational transitions of CS in this source. The absorption lines are centred on average around -10 kms−1. Temperatures for CS, hot 13CO and 12CO v=1-2 agree well and are around 700 K. We derive a CS abundance of 8×10−3 and 2×10−6 with respect to CO and H2 respectively.

One exciting legacy of the Kepler mission was the discovery of about a dozen transiting circumbinary (CB) planets, despite potential barriers to planet formation in these systems. Determining the CB planet occurrence rate, and thus the efficiency of CB planet formation, depends on assumptions about the sensitivity of Kepler to CB planets as a function of the mutual inclination between the binary and planetary orbits, since it is a key parameter in determining whether and how frequently CB planets transit.

The HIgh Resolution Mid-infrared Spectrometer - HIRMES is the 3rd generation instrument that will fly on SOFIA in early 2020. HIRMES primary science is to investigate protoplanetary disk physics with a focus on the evolution of distribution of oxygen, water ice, water vapor and molecular hydrogen during planet formation. Science is achieved through background limited detection of spectral lines at resolving powers (RP) of 10^5 or velocity resolution of 3 km/s. The high velocity resolution enables us to use Kepler's law to locate the radial distributions of the emitting species.

Thanks to precision radial velocity surveys, Kepler, TESS, GAIA and WFIRST, we will soon have a relatively complete understanding of the demographics of planets and planetary systems.

In the last decade, Spitzer, Herschel and ALMA have opened up a new era of supernova studies. New findings include detections of dust and molecules from supernovae and supernova remnants. These findings are paving the ways to understand if supernovae can be the major source of dust in galaxies, and to constrain explosive nucleo-synthesis, that is considered to be the main source of elements in galaxies, and explosion mechanisms, which would provide kinetic energy into the interstellar medium of galaxies.

Starburst galaxies are an important phenomenon in the universe due to the presence of enhanced star formation and the accompanying strong outflows into the intergalactic medium. Nearby starburst galaxies M82 and NGC 253 with their massive outflows provide an excellent laboratory for the study of starburst-driven winds where we can spatially resolve the wind and study the magnetic field geometry in detail. We find that the magnetic field in M82 has been entrained into a supergalactic wind that is revealed to originate from a base area in the disk of at least 700pc in diameter.

More than 20% of nearby main sequence stars are surrounded by debris disks, where planetesimals, larger bodies similar to asteroids and comets in our own Solar System, are ground down through collisions.  The resulting dusty material is directly linked to any planets in the system, providing an important probe of the processes of planet formation and subsequent dynamical evolution.

Massive, cold, dense filaments, often appearing as infrared dark clouds (IRDCs), are the nurseries of massive stars. No measurements of magnetic fields in IRDCs in a state prior to the onset of high-mass star formation (HMSF) have previously been available, and prevailing HMSF theories do not consider strong magnetic fields.Our recent polarization observations show that massive filaments are strongly magnetized and that the strong magnetic field is as important as turbulence and gravity for HMSF.

I will present the first velocity-resolved [OI] emissions in the LMC, together with other emission lines from carbon-bearing species. In the observed four star-forming regions, the line profiles of CO, 13CO and [CI] emissions are similar, whereas [CII] typically shows wider line profiles or an additional velocity component. The [OI] profiles match those of CO at some positions, while they are more similar to the [CII] profiles at other positions.

We present an overview and latest results of the SOFIA Massive (SOMA) star formation survey, which aims to build up a sample of ~50 high- and intermediate-mass protostars in a range of different environments that are observed with SOFIA-FORCAST from ~10 to 40 μm to test theoretical models of massive star formation. We present multi-wavelength images and build their spectral energy distributions (SEDs) together with archival Spitzer and Herschel data and other ground-based IR data.

Resolved observations in the Milky Way and integrated measurements in nearby galaxies have shown that the presence of molecular gas, in particular dense molecular gas, is linked to the presence of star formation. This trend, however, has a large amount of scatter suggesting that additional physical parameters beyond the amount of dense gas play a role in setting this relationship.  Disentangling these parameters requires resolved measurements of dense molecular gas in environments with a much wider range of conditions than found in the Milky Way.

The nature of dark matter is one of the most important outstanding questions in modern cosmology and astrophysics. Uncovering the properties of the dark matter particle could result in significant leaps in our understanding of fundamental physics and impact numerous astrophysical models. It is well understood that the microphysics of the dark matter particle impacts its clustering properties on different scales. The most widely accepted dark matter model, cold dark matter, has had tremendous success explaining the large-scale structure of the universe.

Sulfur has been observed to be severely depleted in dense clouds leading to uncertainty in the molecules that contain it and the chemistry behind their evolution. Here, we present high-resolution infrared spectroscopy of absorption by the ν₃ rovibrational band of SO₂ obtained with the Echelon-Cross-Echelle Spectrograph on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. We use this data to shed light on the sulfur chemistry in young stellar objects (YSOs).

Fueled by advances in software, computation, microelectronics, and large optics fabrication, a new type of sky survey will soon begin. In a relentless campaign of 30 second exposures, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will cover the sky deeply in six bands 0.3 – 1.1 micron every week for ten years, opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales. The deep images from the LSST will chart billions of remote galaxies in 4-D, providing multiple interlocking probes of the mysterious Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

The chemical input and high energy feedback of massive star formation are important mechanisms for Galactic ecology. Despite of the importance, we barely understand the massive star formation since they are typically far at several kpc distance and deeply embedded in the densest parts of molecular clouds. The Giant HII regions (GHII) possess various evolutionary stages of massive star and star cluster formation thus have been good laboratories for the observational constraints of their formation mechanisms.