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. 

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: 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).