Meeting Reports

The annual Fast Radio Burst conference was held as an entirely virtual event on 6–9 July inclusive, with talks spread over three time zones and an online communication channel for discussions.

Key questions about ice on the red planet, its climate record and its potential for habitability were the subject of the seventh edition of the International Conference on Mars Polar Science and Exploration, held for the first time in the Southern Hemisphere.

Cosmology now has a standard model — a remarkably simple description of the Universe, its contents and its history. A symposium held last September in Cambridge, UK, gave this model a ‘health check’ and discussed fascinating questions that lie beyond it.

Every 10 years, X-ray astronomers gather in Bologna, Italy, to review the state of the field. After 30 years of these meetings, is there really still a separate field of X-ray astronomy?

Seventy years after the first detection of interstellar magnetic fields, experts met in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, on 10–14 June 2019, to discuss new perspectives on interstellar magnetic fields from small to large scales, from the Milky Way to distant galaxies and from observations to theories and simulations.

A Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics workshop in July 2019 directed attention to the Hubble constant discrepancy. New results showed that it does not appear to depend on the use of any one method, team or source. Proposed solutions focused on the pre-recombination era.

To what extent do small-scale processes, such as star formation and black-hole accretion, affect global galaxy properties such as stellar masses, star formation rates and chemical abundances?

The European Astronomical Society awarded its most prestigious prizes during its annual meeting, the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science, held in Lyon, France, from 24 to 28 June 2019.

Held in Bologna, Italy, in May 2019, the conference served to engage a wide community in the planning for this first open observatory in very-high-energy gamma rays, expected to start full operation in 2025.

Gender equity across the globe is improving thanks to dedicated efforts, policies, monitoring, training and assessment. However, progress is slow and more needs to be done. Numbers don’t tell the whole story, but quantitative surveys are helping to gauge the situation.

The European Astronomical Society (EAS) awarded its most prestigious prizes during its annual meeting, the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS), held in Liverpool from 3 April to 6 April 2018.

The biennial Harvard Sackler conference this year focused on gravitational-wave astrophysics, with a comprehensive programme that reviewed recent discoveries and discussed prospects for a bright future.

Fifty-one years after Lyman-alpha lines were predicted (and 20 years after this author got involved in searching for Lyman-alpha galaxies), it was a pleasure to see so much progress in this field in the Spring Cosmic Lyman-Alpha Workshop at Tokyo University.

‘Why is there a black hole where women should be?’ asked Member of Parliament Chi Onwurah during her plenary talk on women in science at EWASS 2018. Gender equity was among a variety of topics discussed in a day-long Special Session.

A diverse group of science communicators from around the world came together in Fukuoka, Japan to discuss outreach strategies in a post-factual society, methods to improve inclusion, best practices for communicating within international collaborations and resources to benefit localized organizations.

Are we alone in the Universe? Is life unique to Earth or a common phenomenon? These fundamental questions represent major puzzles of contemporary science, and were inspiration for a NASA conference on the prebiotic conditions of the early Solar System.

With the ever-growing list of exoplanets fuelling hope for finding life beyond the Solar System, the recent Breakthrough Discuss meeting redirected attention back to our own neighbourhood.

Feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGNs) remains controversial despite its wide acceptance as necessary to regulate massive galaxy growth. Consequently, we held a workshop in October 2017, at Leiden’s Lorentz Center, to distinguish between the reality and myths of feedback.

IAU Symposium 337 was held at Jodrell Bank Observatory in September 2017 to celebrate the past fifty years of pulsar astrophysics and to look forward to the next fifty.

How do you build a (distance) ladder from the closest stars to the far-away supernovae and all the way back to the last scattering surface of the Universe? Jeremy Mould summarizes some of the highlights of the Stellar Populations and the Distance Scale conference.