Astronomical Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, CZ-25165 Ondrejov

Dear colleagues,

Many successfully developed projects and results presented at the recent astronomical meetings make me believe that the role of Be stars in present astrophysics is changing in a positive sense. A few years ago, even good proposals or grant applications could be refused, just because the subject of their study was Be stars, considered to be too peculiar and so not important for the complex astrophysical research. During the last few months and years the peculiarity of Be stars has begun to be understood in a different way. The Be stars are now being seen as objects with a significant evolutionary status and as systems involving extreme physical conditions. Thus they are ideal objects to test our dynamical and evolutionary models, particularly those in which the extreme physical parameters play an important role. Certainly we are only at the beginning of this positive development and this optimistic view can be somewhat premature. There is still a long way in front of us before we can understand the physics and exact place of these objects in the universe. A sophisticated coordination of different observational and theoretical projects as well as learning how to use the new modern observational facilities and how to get access to them may considerably accelerate progress.

The Organizing Committee (WG OC) of our Working Group was very active during the last two years, and I hope that it took several steps useful for the positive rise of our field. Let me briefly inform you about them.

Our Be Star Newsletter is certainly an important communication tool for the whole WG. For technical and organizational reasons, the Newsletter was moved to the new web site. The OC discussed its present state and suggested some small improvements in order to increase its efficiency. The OC again appreciated highly the work of the editors G.J. Peters, D.R. Gies, and D. McDavid.

The Newsletter is now published regularly in 2-3 issues per year. A limited number of hard copies is produced for libraries and WG members without Internet access. The editors can decide on the number of hard copies and their distribution in the way that the publication expenses are minimized. Besides traditional topics (abstracts of new publications, campaign announcements, etc.), the Newsletter should also bring shorter review papers, reports on PhD theses, and valuable reports from amateur astronomers. Contributions of amateur astronomers appear almost regularly in our Newsletter now and it is a very positive trend. Thanks to it the good quality data from amateur astronomers has been integrated into several papers in refereed journals.

The OC concluded that the results of the Be star research were not appropriately presented in some general astronomical reviews and that an up-to-date review on Be stars is missing. The PASP editors kindly accepted our proposal to considered for publication a new modern review in their journal. The WG OC nominated two authors for the review, who should submit a review outline to the PASP editors in early 2003.

The last meeting on Be stars was held in 1999 in Alicante, Spain. Due to the rapid development of the field and mainly to new observational facilities, another meeting with a somewhat broader range of topics is highly needed in 2004-2005. After formulating preliminary goals of the meeting, the OC elected 7 SOC members, who then elected 3 more. This SOC and representatives of the LOC then elected two SOC co-chairs (S.P. Owocki and S. Stefl). The other members of the SOC are: C. Aerts, D. Baade, J.E. Bjorkman, J.M. Marlborough, I. Negueruela, A. Okazaki, P. Stee, and R.H.D. Townsend. The SOC members were elected taking into account the representation of main topics of the meeting and an appropriate distribution of geographical regions, observational methods, and important projects. The SOC will submit a proposal for the IAU symposium or colloquium in February 2003.

For the first time, a meeting on active B stars should be held outside Europe and North America. The selected venue, Chile, is close to the VLTI facility, thus emphasizig interferometry as the method expected to bring the most significant progress to the field during this decade. The meeting is timed just for the period when results from more than one year of regular VLTI observations can be presented but still when the large part of the B/Be star community will have to learn how to use the facility. The meeting should facilitate the access of the broad community to the VLTI, but at the same time also to strengthen the support of the VLTI, e.g. by construction of physically consistent models. These are necessary mainly in the phase of model dependent analyses of visibility curves and for definition of effective stellar projects for interferometric observations.

Interferometry should form only one important part of the meeting. The other sessions will be devoted to results of space projects, dynamical modeling of photospheric processes that might feed material into a circumstellar disk, dynamical modeling of circumstellar disks (disk oscillations, role of magnetic field in the disks, interaction of stellar magnetic fields with the disk), and the role of binarity in systems with Be components (forced oscillations in binary systems, binarity vs. rotation relations, influence of the second component on a Be star disk). Some of these topics may not be sufficiently elaborated at the present time, and the SOC and WG OC should use the Newsletter and all other means to stimulate research in these directions.

I would like to wish you all a lot of success both in your personal and astronomical life in the year 2003.

Stanislav Stefl

OC Chairman