Thoughts from the Outgoing Chair of the Working Group

Dear Colleagues,

At the last IAU General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro my membership on the SOC and my mandate as Co-Chair of the Working Group came to an end. First of all I would like to thank all of you who contribute to make these tasks a very enriching and pleasant experience, both in the professional and personal sides. Particular thanks to the members of the SOC for their confidence and support, and to Gerrie Peters, Doug Gies and David McDavid for their continued effort in maintaining the Be Stars Newsletter as an efficient and reliable source of information about what is going on in relation with the active B stars research. And a very special thank to Gerrie Peters for her service as Co-Chair during the last triennium, and for her generosity in assuming the Chair for the next period 2010 2012. Her expertise and enthusiasm made my work an easy and pleasant task. I am sure our Working Group remains in the best hands.

The field of Be star research has been very active during the last triennium, and we can expect this activity to increase. The recent development of powerful instrumentation, both ground-based and in space, has led to significant progress in our understanding of active B stars physics. High precision photometry from spacecraft (MOST, CoRoT, Kepler) and its analysis with the techniques of asteroseismology is providing important insights on the internal structure of Be stars and their rotation. The advent of the VLTI interferometer and the CHARA array has allowed the spatial resolution of several Be star photospheres and disks. The new generation of high-resolution spectropolarimeters (Narval, Espadons) provides clues about magnetic fields and the confinement of the circumstellar environment. Large on-going and future galactic plane surveys (IPHAS, VPHAS+, INTEGRAL) are uncovering new populations of different classes of active B stars, with a great potential for studies of galactic structure.

All these and many other hot topics and new developments in the field of the active B star research will be presented at the upcoming IAU Symposium 272 "Active OB stars: structure, evolution, mass loss and critical limits", to be held in Paris in July 19–23, 2010. Symposium 272 constitutes the next major gathering of the Be star community worldwide, following the successful meetings held in Alicante (1999) and Sapporo (2005). I look forward to seeing most of you in Paris next July.

Juan Fabregat, Co-Chair of the Working group on Active B Stars (2006–09)