Royal Astronomical Society of Canada
Victoria Centre
Annual General Meeting and Dinner
Saturday, November 14, 2008
to be
held
at the Gorge Vale Golf Club
1005 Craigflower Road, Victoria, BC
SPEAKER
Celebrating
400 years of the telescope with the first image of another Solar System - Dr.
Christian Marois, HIA
Are there Earth-like planets orbiting other stars? Is there life elsewhere in
the Universe? Humanity has been waiting for more than 2,000 years for an answer
to these questions. With his invention, the telescope, Galileo Galilei saw for
the first time another "mini" planetary system - it was Jupiter and its moons.
After 400 years of technological achievements, we now have large enough
telescopes and good enough instruments to directly image planets orbiting other
stars.
For the past 8 years, my team and I have been using the world's biggest
telescopes to search for planets orbiting nearby young stars. I will describe
the path that we have followed that led, in 2008, to a breakthrough discovery -
the first images of a multi-planet system. This three Jupiter-like planets
system, called HR 8799bcd, is located 130 light years from Earth. This detection
marks a crucial first step in the ultimate quest of finding a life-sustaining
Earth-like planet orbiting another star.
GEMINI RELEASES
HISTORIC DISCOVERY IMAGE OF PLANETARY -FIRST FAMILY- - Gemini Observatory
Bio: Dr Marois completed his Ph.D. at the Universit� de Montr�al
in 2004. The main topic of his thesis work was speckle/noise suppression for
direct exoplanet imaging using advance image processing techniques. After
completing his first postdoctoral project at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in California and a brief research assignment at the University of
California Berkeley late 2007, he became a research associate early 2008 at the
NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. He now splits his research time between
developing the next generation exoplanet imager, the Gemini Planet Imager, and
pursuing an exoplanet imaging survey using currently available instruments. In
2008, Dr Marois led the team that took the first image of another planetary
system, the HR 8799bcd three planets system. This achievement was selected as
the runner-up for best scientific discovery of 2008 by the prestigious Science
magazine. Dr Marois and his Canadian collaborators were also named the "2008
scientist of the year", a distinction given annually by the French CBC station.
BUSINESS MEETING
-
Call to order
-
Minutes
of 2008 Annual General Meeting (Members Only)
-
Secretary�s Annual Report (Members Only)
-
2009
Financial Report (335kb) (Members Only)
-
National Representative Report
-
President's Message
-
Awards
-
Volunteer Appreciation Certificates - Garry
Sedun, Lauri Roche, Natasha van Bentum, Joe Carr, Sherry
Buttnor, Sid Sidhu
-
Excellence in Astrophotography - Charles
Banville
-
Newton-Ball Award - Scott Mair
-
Election of officers - incumbents all elected by
acclamation; all officers retain current positions
-
Motion - create an Associate Membership for Victoria Centre
- carried unanimously
-
New business from the floor - none
-
Door Prizes - awarded
-
Adjournment