The predictions of our chemodynamical simulations from cosmological initial conditions are as follows: The disk formed Inside-out. Metallicity radial and vertical gradients exist, but no [α/Fe] radial gradient. Metallicity radial gradient is steeper at higher redshifts. The [α/Fe]-[Fe/H] relation is caused by the delayed enrichment of Type Ia supernovae (not with long lifetimes, but with the metallicity effect). The bulge formed through the assembly of small gas-rich galaxies at high redshifts. [α/Fe] is higher, [Mn/Fe] is lower, [(Na, Al)/Fe] are higher than the disk. Metallicity and [α/Fe] vertical gradients exist, which is caused by the increase of metal-rich and low [α/Fe] populations at lower latitudes. Bars may form later, which may show boxy and cylindrical rotation. Half of thick disk stars (kinetically selected) come from minor mergers. [α/Fe] is higher, and [Mn/Fe] is lower than the thin disk, but [(Na, Al, Cu, Zn)/Fe] are lower than the bulge. There are metallicity vertical, weak metallicity radial, and no [α/Fe] radial gradients. It would be interesting to compare the predictions with other models such as radial mixing, disk heating, and clumpy disks.

For the solar neighborhood, the frequency distributions of elements from oxygen to zinc are in excellent agreement not only for the average values but also for the scatter. In chemodynamical simulations, chemical enrichment takes place inhomogeneously, and the scatter originates from a combination of various effects - mergers, migration, and in-situ. The inhomogeneous enrichment is important in reproducing observed nitrogen abundances, and also in understanding elemental abundance patterns of dwarf spheroidal galaxies and carbon-enhanced damped Lyman α systems.

We have recently proposed a new approach to the asteroid family classification by combining the classical HCM method with an automated procedure to add newly discovered members to existing families. This approach is specifically intended to cope with ever increasing asteroid data sets, and consists of several steps to segment the problem and handle the very large amount of data in an efficient and accurate manner. We briefly present all these steps and show the results from three subsequent updates making use of only the automated step of attributing the newly numbered asteroids to the known families. We describe the changes of the individual families membership, as well as the evolution of the classification due to the newly added intersections between the families, resolved candidate family mergers, and emergence of the new candidates for the mergers. We thus demonstrate how by the new approach the asteroid family classification becomes stable in general terms (converging towards a permanent list of confirmed families), and in the same time evolving in details (to account for the newly discovered asteroids) at each update.

Relativistic effects play an important role in the performance of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and in world-wide time comparisons. The GPS has provided a model for algorithms that take relativistic effects into account. In the future exploration of space, analogous considerations will be necessary for the dissemination of time and for navigation. We discuss relativistic effects that are important for a navigation system such as at Mars. We describe relativistic principles and effects that are essential for navigation systems, and apply them to navigation satellites carrying atomic clocks in orbit about Mars, and time transfer between Mars and Earth. It is shown that, as in the GPS, relativistic effects are not negligible.

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is being built by the Chinese and will be the largest single dish radio telescope in the world. FAST, with much increase in sensitivity, will give astronomers good opportunities to answer many fundamental questions in astronomy. Here we give a brief introduction of FAST and its enormous potential for studying Galactic and extragalactic masers.

cmfgen is an atmosphere code developed to model the spectra of a variety of objects – O stars, Wolf-Rayet stars, luminous blue variables, A and B stars, central stars of planetary nebula, and supernovae. The principal computational aim of cmfgen is to determine the temperature and ionization structure of the atmosphere, and the atomic level populations. Toward this end, we have developed several different radiative transfer modules that (a) solve the transfer equation for spherical geometry in the comoving frame, (b) solve the static transfer equation in the plane parallel approximation without, or with, a vertical velocity field, (c) solve the static transfer code for a spherical atmosphere allowing for all relativistic terms, (d) solve the time-dependent spherical transfer equation to first order in v/c for a homologous expansion, and (e) solve the time-dependent spherical transfer equation allowing for all relativistic terms. To achieve consistency between the radiation field, temperature structure, and level populations we use a linearization technique. Line blanketing is accurately treated while complex photoionization cross-sections, containing numerous resonances, can also be handled. Spectra, for comparison with observation, are computed using cmf_flux. Several other auxiliary programs have also been developed – these include diagnostic tools as well as programs that allow the effect on spectra of rotation and departures from spherical geometry to be investigated. In this presentation we will briefly describe cmfgen and auxiliary codes.

A general discussion, based on the ht “Fourier Slice Theorem,” is given for the problem of deprojecting the observed light distribution of galaxies to obtain their intrinsic three dimensional light distribution or “shape.” Several results are obtained: 1) A model-independent deprojection of an axially symmetric galaxy is shown to be possible only if the symmetry axis lies in the plane of the sky. 2) A simple criterion is given to test whether two different galaxies can have the same intrinsic shape, based solely on their observed projections. 3) It is shown that a homogeneous class of galaxies can be deprojected using a sufficiently large number of projections of random perspective.

Since the last IAU Colloquium devoted to Ap stars, die continuous development of high signal to noise observations and of computerized analysis tools have greatly increased the effectiveness of abundance anomalies as a probe of hydrodynamical processes in stars. Until the 1980s, they seemed limited to ApBp and AmFm stars where the effects are largest. More recently the abundances of Li and He have been suggested to play important diagnostic roles for hydrodynamics in both the Sun (Proffitt and Michaud 1991b, Pinsonneault et al. 1989) and Halo stars (Proffitt and Michaud 1991a, Pinsonneault et al. 1992, Vauclair 1988, Charbonnel et al. 1992, Deliyannis and Demarque 1991). The observation of a Li abundance gap in F stars of clusters has raised the question of the link between these objects and the AmFm stars (Michaud 1986, Charbonneau and Michaud 1988, 1991) or alternately with solar type stars. The observed Li abundance on die subgiant branch sheds some light on this problem (Charbonneau et al. 1989; Charbonnel and Vauclair 1992). In solar type stars, the observed Li abundance constrains the superficial turbulence that may inhibit surface He gravitational settling (Proffitt and Michaud 1991b) whose effects can be detected using solar seismology (Guzik and Cox 1992, Dziembowski et al. 1992).

Developments in the field since the review of Roche (1989) are discussed. Section 1 describes the results from detailed models of the dust emission from planetary nebulae and summarises the derived dust-to-gas mass ratios. The properties of the remarkable gas-poor planetary nebula IRAS 18333–2357, located in the globular cluster M22, are discussed in Section 2. The use of thermal infrared imaging to map the distribution of different dust components is reviewed in Section 3, and two recently applied optical probes of nebular dust properties are described: emission line spectropolarimetry, and spectroscopy of the Extended Red Emission (ERE). The final section describes recent results from infrared spectroscopy. The spectra of carbon-rich post-AGB objects have provided valuable new insights into the nature and evolution of the materials responsible for the UIR bands, while unusual oxide grains and crystalline ice emission have been detected around oxygen-rich post-AGB objects. The spectra of a small number of objects show evidence for the simultaneous presence of both oxygen-rich and carbon-rich material.

Some general properties and evolutionary status of magnetic Ap stars are briefly considered. Chemical abundance anomalies are discussed from the point of view of current theories presumably the radiative diffusion theory in the presence of magnetic field.

Interplanetary dust probably has a cometary origin. Collectible samples of this material are likely to be more representative of the meteoroid complex than are meteorites. Since 1974, NASA U-2 spacecraft has been able to collect over 200 interplanetary particles in the stratosphere. Roughly 10% have spheroidal shapes indicating previous melting. The rest seems to come from the gentle fragmentation of a single type of parent-body material: a black aggregate of grains mainly 1000 A in size, whose properties are closely similar to C1 and C2 chondritic material.

After a brief presentation of the Hipparcos mission, and an overview of the astrometric and photometric results obtained from the main mission and from Tycho, more details are given on the parallaxes. Absolute parallaxes have been obtained for 117 955 entries of the Hipparcos Catalogue, out of a total of 118 218, with a median precision of 0.97 mas for stars brighter than 9. This precision varies with apparent magnitude and ecliptic latitude. The estimated systematic error is smaller than 0.1 mas. The distances of more than 20 000 stars are determined to better than 10 %. Some more statistics are presented.

A few applications of this fantastic amount of new and accurate data are presented, in the fields of absolute magnitude calibrations, stellar physics, distance scale determination.

The Iron Project is an international consortium dedicated to the computation of atomic data for astrophysical applications. Although the project has been mainly concerned with ions in the iron group, the earlier papers gave priority to calculations of $A$-values and electron impact collision strengths for infrared transitions. In the present report we include a compilation of these data which will become useful in the spectral modelling of planetary nebulae.

The conditions within the nuclear bulge (NB, R ~ 300 pc) of our Galaxy are extreme: less than 0.1% of the volume of the galactic disc contains more than 10% of the total ISM and stars. There are indications that star formation in the NB is not a continuous process, but rather undergoes cyclic variations. Details of the current and past star formation processes and the stellar content of the central parsecs - especially the ratio of old to young population - are not very well known (Mezger et al., 1996).

We discuss follow-up X-ray observations of giant-amplitude, non-recurrent X-ray flares, interpreted as tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes at the centers of the flaring galaxies. The flare observations open up a new window to study supermassive black holes and their environment, and the physics of accretion events, in non-active galaxies.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html

This review talk will deal almost exclusively with the radio aspects of low luminosity radio galaxies, as the other wavelength bands (optical, X, IR) are covered by others during this conference. By low radio luminosity we mean a radio power at 20 cm in the range 1019 to 1024,5 W Hz–1 (Hubble constant of 100, as throughout this talk). At the upper limit occurs the “break” in the radio luminosity (RLF) (Auriemma et al 1977) as well as the transition from Fanaroff -Riley type I to type II (Fanaroff & Riley, 1974). This limitation to weak radio powers does not necessarily imply that such radio sources constitute a homogeneous class of objects; it has been shown by Wrobel & Heeschen (1991) that a number of radio galaxies of very low luminosity have a ratio between far-infrared and radio emission similar to spiral galaxies and this might suggest that these objects are powered by star formation phenomena. Long baseline interferometry is able to pinpoint compact radio nuclei and therefore can distinguish starburst related radio sources from those powered by nuclear activity (see Slee et al 1994).

This paper is a short review of the dynamics of the asteroidal resonances as currently determined from maps and simulations over 106 – 107 years. The main recent results concern the extensive exploration of the phase space to determine domains of initial conditions leading to close approaches to the inner planets, the topological dynamics of the planar Sun-Jupiter-asteroid problem at very high eccentricities and the differences amongst 2/1 and 3/2 resonances able to explain the existence of a gap in the asteroidal belt at the 2/1 resonance and of a group of asteroids in the 3/2 resonance. Current results point to a confirmation of Wisdom's theory for the formation of the gaps by gravitational evolution and scattering by the inner planets.

We have utilized the latest stellar models of the Y2 (Yonsei-Yale) collaborators and color-magnitude diagrams of globular clusters to infer ages and absolute magnitudes of their horizontal branches (HB). The intrinsic (B – V) color indices of the turn-offs, of the globular clusters were used to find ages. For 47 clusters that appear to be coeval (within ±0.7 Gyr), we find an average age of 12.5 Gyr. We adopt this age and infer the absolute magnitudes of the turn-offs, from the clusters [Fe/H] values. The absolute magnitude of the horizontal branches or RR Lyrae stars are then determined from the difference between the apparent magnitudes of the horizontal branches (or RR Lyrae stars) and the apparent magnitude of the turn-offs, VTO. We conclude: 1) The slope of the MV(HB), [Fe/H] relation is ~0.3 for clusters with [Fe/H] values between —0.5 to —1.5. The relation has zero slope for [Fe/H] values smaller than −1.5. 2) For [Fe/H] < -1.3, the MV(HB) or MV values of RRLyrae stars are not only a function of [Fe/H], but the horizontal-branch type in the sense that the clusters with the blue horizontal branches have more luminous horizontal branches than clusters with red horizontal branches. The same results are found by inferring the luminosities of the HBs from pulsating blue stragglers.

Using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope archive, color-magnitude diagrams have been constructed for globular Cluster 4 in the Fornax dSph galaxy and its surrounding field. These diagrams extend below the main-sequence turnoffs and have yielded measurements of the ages of the populations. In particular, from our analysis Cluster 4 shows [Fe/H] ≃ 2.0, a value significantly lower than that derived for the Fornax field ([Fe/H] ≃ −1.40). Putting our results in the frame of the findings of Buonanno et al. (1998) for the Fornax clusters 1, 2, 3 and 5, a global analysis of the properties of Fornax stellar populations has been performed.

Processes that promote the formation of dense cold clouds in the interstellar media of galaxies are reviewed. Those that involve background stellar mass include two-fluid instabilities, spiral density wave shocking, and bar accretion. Young stellar pressures trigger gas accumulation on the periphery of cleared cavities, which often take the form of rings by the time new stars form. Stellar pressures also trigger star formation in bright-rim structures, directly squeezing the pre-existing clumps in nearby clouds and clearing out the lower density gas between them. Observations of these processes are common. How they fit into the empirical star formation laws, which relate the star formation rate primarily to the gas density, is unclear. Most likely, star formation follows directly from the formation of cold dense gas, whatever the origin of that gas. If the average pressure from the weight of the gas layer is large enough to produce a high molecular fraction in the ambient medium, then star formation should follow from a variety of processes that combine and lose their distinctive origins. Pressurized triggering might have more influence on the star formation rate in regions with low average molecular fraction. This implies, for example, that the arm/interarm ratio of star formation efficiency should be higher in the outer regions of galaxies than in the main disks.