SGAA/SSAA: Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Astrophysik und Astronomie
One highlight of Year 2023 was the SSAA General Assembly (GA), which took place on 5-6 October, 2023 at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Geneva. It was attended by about 30+ participants. The GA consists of a business meeting, which was held in the afternoon of October 5, followed by scientific talks from different fields of the Swiss astronomy landscape and all academic levels on both days.
Another highlight for the SSAA was that the Prix Schläfli in Astronomy was awarded to Simone Bavera from the University of Geneva. An award ceremony took place at the GA. Morevoer, the SSAA Edith Alice Müller Award for the best PhD theses finished in 2022 was given to Simone Bavera and Michael Crétignier. Both awardees gave award presentations at the GA. Our warmest congratulations for both awardees for their achievement. For details on the GA please visit www.ssaa.ch/the-society/general-assemblies/ga-2023.
The SSAA provided the Swiss contribution to the Journal Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A). This contribution ensures that researchers affiliated with Swiss research institutes can publish their research articles in this journal free of charge. Articles published in A&A are open access.
The "Saas-Fee Advanced Course" has taken place practically annually since 1971. In 2023 it was devoted to "The Circum-Galactic Medium across cosmic time: an observational and modeling challenge" and was held from 19 to 24 March 2023 in Les Diablerets, in the Swiss Alps. It has been organized by Floriane Leclercq, Haruka Kusakabe, Thibault Garel, Jorryt Matthee, Anne Verhamme, and Annalisa De Cia. This course was primarily targeted at Ph.D. and advanced M.Sc. students but can also be valuable to young postdoctoral researchers who would like to start exploring the field. Three internationally well-known researchers gave lectures throughout the week: Prof. Céline Péroux (ESO, Garching), Prof. Michele Fumagalli (University of Milano Bicocca), and Prof. Jeremy Blaizot (CRAL, University of Lyon). The course website can be found here: https://www.astro.unige.ch/saasfee2023/
Also, a satisfaction survey has been carried out after the event, which is available under the following link: https://www.astro.unige.ch/saasfee2023/sites/default/Public/questionnaire_answers.pdf
Finally, the lecture notes will be published by Springer Nature as a separate volume within the well-known Lecture Series "Saas-Fee Advanced Course".
The president of SSAA, Margit Haberreiter, participated at the Business Meeting of the European Astronomical Society January 10, 2024, in Oxford, UK (online) as well as the Business Lunch of the EAS with Affiliated Societies on July 2, 2024 (online).
The SSAA supports early career scientist in building up and strengthening their network and collaboration. Each year SSAA announces a call for travel grant. As an outcome of the 2023 call the SSAA supported 10 early career scientists with travel grants. The awardees are Utsav Akhaury (EPFL), Simone Bavera (UniGE), Michele Bianco (EPFL), Hritam Chakrobarty (UniGE), Joris Josiek (UniGe), Kristina Kipfer (Uni Bern), Adarsh Kuruvanthodi (UniGe), Marit Mol Lous (UniZH), Alberto Saldanalopez (UniGe), and Eloïse Vitte (UniGe).
An important element of the SSAA activities is to support outreach activities. In 2023, the SSAA supported 2 projects, as briefly described in the following. First, "The Massive Exoplanet MEME Exhibition (MEME)" project has been supported. The 'MEME meets Bern' event took place on the 24th of October, 2023. It was organized by Marit Mol Lous with support from Sophie Krummenacher and Thibaut Roger and a lot of volunteers. Four classes of high-school students from three different schools (Gymnasium Burgdorf, Gymnasium Oberaargau and Gymnasium Lerbermatt) visited the University of Bern and followed an afternoon program. This consisted first of all of a small tour through the MEME gallery, which had been set up in the Physics building of the University. More than 300 MEMEs were displayed, and they were accompanied with informative texts, written by (mostly local) researchers. The students were asked to answer questions about astrophysics during the tour by using the information on the MEMEs and the informative texts. The second part of the program was a visit to the planetarium, where Thibaut Roger gave tours. Lastly there were two lectures given by Professor Christoph Mordasini and PhD student Marie Azevedo. There was a closing apero where the high-school students could ask questions to astrophysicists.
The second outreach project supported by SSAA in 2023 was “General Relativity for High School Students”. Already in 2018, Alice Gasparini, in collaboration with Andreas Müller (University of Geneva) wrote a Course material and students activities on General Relativity and Cosmology, accessible with conceptual and mathematical means at secondary level II/high school. The course consists of a textbook and several series of learning activities (in French) introducing high school pupils to General Relativity and Modern Cosmology. Subjects like cosmological expansion, cosmological equations, dark matter and dark energy, black holes, and gravitational waves are approached with a medium level of difficulty, i.e., based on a high school level in mathematics and physics. The result is the first edition of "Cosmologie & Relativité générale, une première approche” edited by the Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes (PPUR). The main purposes of this book are: i) To consolidate and enlarge pupils’ existing knowledge in physics and mathematics while studying subjects they find fascinating; ii)To improve links between high school and real research: students who learn physics up to the 19th century are left with distorted ideas about the main issues in modern physics. Through the support of the follow-up SSAA outreach project “General Relativity for High School Students” this book could now also be made available in Italian with the title "Introduzione alla cosmologia e alla relatività generale", published by Person Italia (https://he.pearson.it/catalogo/4307). Also 200 copies were made available for school kids for free.