The Business and Scientific Sessions of the Meeting of the Working Group on Active B Stars at the 26th IAU General Assembly

Space Sciences Center, University of Southern California, 835 W. 37th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1341; gjpeters@mucen.usc.edu

1. Introduction

The meeting of the Working Group on Active B Stars consisted of a business session followed by a scientific session containing invited and contributed talks. The titles of the talks and their presenters are listed below.

Outgoing Chair of the Working Group, Stan Owocki welcomed the attendees. He presented a brief update on the status of the proceedings from the meeting "Active OB-Stars: Laboratories for Stellar and Circumstellar Physics" held in Sapporo, Japan from August 29--September 2, 2005. The editors of the proceedings are S. Stefl, S. Owocki, and A. Okazaki. A proposal to continue IAU recognition of the Working Group during the 2006-09 triennium was submitted by S. Owocki by the Spring deadline.

2. Business Session

2.1 Be Star Newsletter

The Be Star Newsletter, published in hard copy at Georgia State University for the Working Group on Active B Stars, continues to be the main source of information on new discoveries, ideas, manuscripts, and meetings on active B stars. G. Peters, D. Gies, and D. McDavid continue, respectively, as Editor-in-Chief, Technical Editor, and Webmaster. Abstracts and announcements are usually posted on our website (www.astro.virginia.edu/~dam3ma/benews/) within 48 hrs of being received. Articles submitted for publication have been refereed since 2000. Although this practice has resulted in fewer full articles, the quality of the published material has been vastly improved. In 2005 we introduced a new section called Community Comments, in which Working Group members can voice opinions or ideas on which the community can submit rebuttal. In March 2005 we published Issue No. 37 that contains the proceedings from the scientific session held during the meeting of the Working Group on Active B Stars at the 25th IAU General Assembly in Sydney, Australia.

2.2 SOC Election Results

In August 2006 an election was held by e-mail ballots that were sent to all current IAU members of the Working Group on Active B Stars. The Scientific Organizing Committee (SOC) for the 2006-09 triennium is:

Term expiring in 2009: Juan Fabregat, Douglas Gies, Huib Henrichs, David McDavid
Term expiring in 2012: Karen Bjorkman, Coralie Neiner, Geraldine Peters, Philippe Stee
Non-voting: President of IAU Division IV: Stars, President of IAU Division V: Variable Stars, Stan Owocki  (Outgoing SOC Chair)

2.3 Action Items

1. Bylaws for Working Group

The bylaws would include a mission statement and rules governing the election of the SOC. Suggestions were made that non-IAU members should be allowed to vote in elections if they have participated in at least one meeting on active B stars within a six year period, and that non Ph.D. researchers might be recognized as voting members if their national committees agree.

2. Other Items

There was a discussion on how to stimulate more participation from Working Group members. In 2006 there was a slight increase in the voter turnout of 25% of the eligible voters compared with 15% in 2003. The number of articles submitted to the Be Star Newsletter has declined, but submissions of abstracts and news items have increased.

2.4 Rules Governing the Election of the SOC in 2006

The top priority of the SOC during the 2006-09 triennium will be to establish a set of bylaws including a set of formal rules governing the election of the Scientific Organizing Committee. The following rules were followed for the 2006 election:

1. The Working Group (WG) is considered to consist of all subscribers of the Be Star Newsletter, Electronic Edition, who are IAU members.

2. Every member of the WG can nominate 4 persons as candidates for the new Organizing Committee (OC) and send them to the Election Officer (chosen from the editors of the Be Star Newsletter.)  The Election Officer selects the 10 candidates with the highest number of votes.  If several individuals have the same number of nominations for the last spot on the ballot, they are all accepted and the number of candidates can be higher than 10.  According to the general IAU rules, only IAU members or new members pending approval at the current General Assembly can be accepted as candidates for OC membership, and balanced regional representation should be taken into account in the nomination of the candidates.

3. The Election Officer must verify that all nominees to be listed as candidates on the ballot are willing to serve if elected.

4. The 4 new OC members are elected from the OC candidates by the members of the WG, who may vote for up to 4 different persons.

5. The 4 persons with the largest numbers of valid votes are elected for a 6-year term. The 4 new and the 4 continuing OC members determine among themselves the new Chairperson.

3. Scientific Session

The program of talks is listed below. Articles based upon these presentations follow this report.

Session 1 (D. McDavid, Chair)

09:20 Observations of the B[e] Star MWC349 with mid-infrared interferometry, A. Quirrenbach
09:35 The Kepler Mission's guest opportunity program: opportunity for optical monitoring of B stars?, M. Smith
10:00 Rotational velocities of Be stars, I. Howarth
10:15 Analysis of the high temperature region in Be stars, A. Ringuelet, A. Torres^*
10:30 Coffee

Session 2. (G. Peters, Chair)
11:00 Statistical Properties of a Sample of Periodically Variable B-Type Supergiants: Evidence of a Pulsation-Mass Loss Connection?, K. Lefever, J. Puls , C. Aerts^*
11:15 The Comings and Goings of Be Stars, V. McSwain
11:30 HD 61273: a new binary system with a hot component showing an Hα emission, D. Briot^*, F. Royer
11:45 Spectropolarimetry of Be stars with FORS1 at the VLT revisited, R. Yudin
12:00 Circumstellar disks from rotating stars with and without magnetic fields, S. Owocki^*, A. ud-Doula, R. Townsend 12:30 Session Ends

^*Presenter

4. Closing Remarks

I would like to thank those who participated in the Working Group meeting through their attendance and the presentation of a set of very interesting talks. Hearty thanks are due to outgoing SOC Chair Stan Owocki, who skillfully led our Working Group for the past 3 years and was one of the primary organizers of the meeting on active B stars in Sapporo, Japan in 2005. We are looking forward to seeing you again in 2009 at the meeting of the Working Group on Active B Stars at the 27th IAU General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro.

Geraldine J. Peters
Co-Chair of the Working Group, 2006-09