Dear Colleague,

we would like to draw your attention on the following announcement (apologies if you receive more than one copy of it).

Please distribute this announcement to all interested colleagues.

A. Tarchi and M. Reid, on behalf of the SOC

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                           1st announcement

       ### International Astronomical Union Symposium 336 ###

    Astrophysical Masers: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe

          September 4-8, 2017 - Cagliari (Sardinia), Italy

SCIENTIFIC RATIONALE:

Astronomical masers touch on a very broad range of astrophysical phenomena.
Originally, maser research concentrated on star formation and evolved stars, where the high resolution afforded by bright maser emission allowed one to probe dynamics on ~1 AU scale and with ~ 1 km/s motions. A couple of decades ago, the discovery of water masers from accretion disks around super-massive black holes opened new avenues to resolve the disks, measure motions, estimate supermassive black hole masses, and derive distances to galaxies geometrically.

Over the past twenty years, there have been meetings focusing on masers spaced by roughly 5 years.  The last meeting devoted to masers was in 2012 in South Africa.  Since then there has been an explosion of work on masers, especially related to the cosmic distance scale, the structure of the Milky Way, and the masses of (AGN) black holes.

While the main focus of the Symposium is on cosmic masers, in order to broaden the impact of the Symposium, we will have also presentations from speakers outside the maser science community who work on similar topics as those listed below. In particular, the astrometric results reached using masers on the structure of the Milky Way and the cosmological distance  scale will be compared with those obtained using other methods (e.g., by the Gaia mission for the Galaxy and Cepheids and gravitational lensing for the extragalactic distance scale). We expect many talks on maser astrometry in the sessions on the Cosmic Distance Scale (Session 2), Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes (Session 3), the Structure of the Milky Way (Session 4), Star Formation (Session 5), Evolved Stars (Session 6). We also plan to have theoretical reviews of forefront questions for the major science topics in each session.

Specific topics for this symposium will include:

- The Structure of the Milky Way

- Local Group Cosmology

- The Cosmic Distance Scale and the Hubble Constant

- Galaxy Kinematics and Black Hole Masses

- The Formation of Massive Stars

- Pulsation and Outflows in Evolved Stars

- Theory of masers and maser sources

VENUE:

The symposium will be held in the Conference Room of the Hotel Regina Margherita. The Venue is located at walking distance from the central historical quarters of Cagliari. Cagliari itself is a enjoyable city with a variety of attractions for all visitors.
Furthermore, the southern part of Sardinia hosts among the most beautiful seashores of the entire island.

CONFERENCE WEB PAGE:

Further information regarding this conference as well as specific details regarding the venue, accommodation, dates, program, etc., will  be available shortly in subsequent announcements and at the conference website, that can be found here:
http://iaus336.oa-cagliari.inaf.it

SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

           * Zulema Abraham (Brazil)
           * Anna Bartkiewicz (Poland)
           * Phil Diamond (UK)
           * Simon Ellingsen (Tasmania)
           * Guido Garay (Chile)
           * Sharmila Goedhart (South Africa)
           * Mareki Honma (Japan)
           * Laurent Loinard (Mexico)
           * Naomi McClure-Griffiths (Australia)
           * Karl Menten (Germany)
           * Luca Moscadelli (Italy)
           * Yilva Pihlstrom (U.S.A.)
           * Mark Reid (U.S.A.), co-Chair
           * Alberto Sanna (Germany)
           * Andrea Tarchi (Italy), Chair
           * Xing-Wu Zheng (China)

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