Astronomical Distance Determination in the Space Age Workshop held at ISSI-BJ
On May 23-27, 2016, the ISSI-BJ workshop on “Astronomical Distance Determination in the Space Age” was successfully held. About 45 scientists from the U.S., Poland, Spain, China, Italy, Germany and Japan etc., participated this meeting.
Knowing the distance of an astrophysical object is key to understanding its formation and evolution. This ISSI-BJ workshop highlights the tremendous amount of recent and continuing research into a myriad of exciting and promising aspects of accurately pinning down the cosmic distance scale. Putting the many recent results and new developments into the broader context of the physics driving cosmic distance determination is the next logical step, which will benefit from the combined efforts of theorists, observers and modellers working on a large variety of spatial scales, and spanning a wide range of expertise.
The workshop covers the following 5 themes: Structure of the Milky Way and the Local Group, Pulsating variables from optical to infrared wavelengths, Distance benchmarks out to the smooth Hubble flow, Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) as standardizable candles, Cosmological constraints.
Under its special program for supporting young scientists, 8 early career scientists, within two years of their PhD, were invited to speak at the Workshop. The Young Scientist session is intended to give young scientists working on the broad scientific topic of the workshop an opportunity to present their projects in front of the expert audience, and to initiate fruitful discussions with these experts. The session on Thursday afternoon opened new perspectives and was highly appreciated by all participants.
Following the Workshop, its output will be published as a volume in the “Space Science Series of ISSI/ISSI-BJ” by Springer, after publication of the chapter as peer-reviewed papers in the journal of “Space Science Reviews”.
