Meeting Summary March 2002

Speaker of the month - Dr Luisa Rebull - CALTECH
Spinning Teenage Stars video (60 minutes)

Rotation of young stars--less than 5 million years old--is key to our understanding of the formation of stars and planetary systems. Without rotation, stars don't have magnetic fields, and without magnetic fields, the Sun would be as boring as most people think it is! After studying about 8000 young stars, we've found 300 new periodic variable stars in Orion and 200 new periodic variable stars in NGC 2264. These stars are all about the same mass as the Sun, but much younger. We find stars with rotation rates ranging from values similar to the Sun to 100 times faster! I will review our current understanding of how we get a planetary system out of a giant cloud of gas and dust, and how rotation might play a role.

Dr Luisa Rebull

URL: http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/rebull/

What's-up by Chris Butler
Chris and Tracy will have a baby - due Aug 23rd 2002.
Congratulations!
video (25 minutes)

Club Announcements
AstroImagers, Dark Sky Interest group
video (20 minutes)

A brand new capability - you can now experience the last OCA meeting by viewing a streaming video. To view these videos you will need to download the latest Realplayer 8 (be sure to download the free Realplayer basic package- only select Realplayer plus if you feel you would benefit from the extra capabilites and want to pay $29 for the product)

Look for the icon to view the video for each section of the meeting. All of the videos have been encoded to account for connection speeds ranging from 56KBs (dialup)->100KBs (cable or DSL). These videos are being streamed from a server setup in the divine offices in Irvine.

please let me know what you think of this feature - Liam Kennedy