Editorial

With this issue we launch a series of invited review articles in the Newsletter. Our intention is to provide an opportunity for authors to write articles of either a theoretical or observational nature on topics of current interest to the Be star community in more depth than is customary for usual Newsletter contributions. Topics on Be and other types of active B stars will be featured. In the first such article in this series, John Porter discusses the structure and maintenence of the disks in Be stars and compares theoretical predictions with observed IR flux distributions. New ideas concerning the pulsation in the extremely energetic  Cep star BW Vul are discussed by Myron Smith in the second invited article. We hope that you enjoy the invited articles in this and future issues.

Also look for contributions on photometric studies of  Cep stars using the Hipparcos database, including a search for new objects, news on a the availability of a newly-released IR database from the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) that should be useful for studying CS disks, photometric activity in  Sco and  CMa, and 27 abstracts of recently-published or submitted papers on active B stars.

As usual, articles and abstracts will be posted on our website ( http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~dam3ma/benews/ ) as they are accepted. Abstracts normally appear within 24 hours of receipt. Please send contributions by Electronic Mail to: benews@mucen.usc.edu with a copy to dam3ma@virginia.edu either as LaTex or postscript/pdf files. We are now requiring that abstracts be submitted as LaTex files using the template provided on our website. We prefer that illustrations be sent by E-mail as postscript files, but we can handle most contemporary picture formats.

The editors wish to thank all who contributed to this issue and look forward to receiving your contributions in 2003. We also look forward to seeing you at the meeting of the Working Group on Active B Stars at the forthcoming IAU General Assembly in Sydney, Australia on July 16 (see announcement in What's Happening!). The highlights of this meeting, including a summary of the scientific program, will appear in Issue 37 of the Newsletter.

We appreciate the continuing support from the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Georgia State University for the production of the paper edition of the Be Star Newsletter and from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia for web hosting.

Gerrie Peters, Editor-in-Chief