Place: Otaru, Hokkaido, Japan
Since the launch on 2005 July 10, the cosmic X-ray satellite Suzaku
has been operating successfully under a close Japan-US collaboration.
Thanks to the unprecedented broad-band coverage provided by the
XRT+XIS and the HXD, aided by their low backgrounds and good energy
responses, a large amount of scientific results are accumulating.
In the International Year of Astronomy 2009,
it is our hope to harvest them, and assemble them into novel
research paradigms that innovate our view of The Energetic Cosmos.
These attempts will further strengthen the ASTRO-H (previously known
as NeXT) project, Suzaku's successor, which is making a steady
progress toward its launch around 2013. Our scope also includes
NuStar and Simbol-X, and further extends to the genuine one-world
X-ray mission, IXO. At the same time, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space
Telescope is producing excellent initial results. The MAXI (Monitor
of All-Sky X-ray Image) experiment, to be onboard the ISS Japan
Experimental Module, is also ready for launch in May 2009.
Given these plentiful high-energy astrophysics results, the
3rd Suzaku conference has been organized. This conference follows the first
one held at Kyoto/Japan in December 2006, and the second at
San Diego/California in December 2007. The conference will be organized so
as to highlight common physics among different types of objects, rather than
treating them separately. Focusing mainly on the results obtained with Suzaku,
the conference will also cover new results from related missions, Chandra,
XMM-Newton, INTEGRAL, Swift, Fermi, and others.
Topics to be covered include:
- Particle acceleration in cosmic shocks and jets (SNRs, Blazars,GRBs,..)
- X-ray diagnostics of cosmic hot plasmas (Galactic diffuse, SNRs,
clusters,..)
- Magnetic activities in stellar objects (pulsars/magnetars, WDs,
stellar flares,.. )
- Primary and reprocessed emissions from accreting objects (BHBs,LMXBs,
ULXs, AGNs, ..)
- X-ray views of the evolution of the universe (GRBs, AGNs, clusters, ..)
- Highlights from the Fermi Space Gamma-Ray Telescope
- Status of the MAXI experiment
- From Suzaku to ASTRO-H and other missions, and further to IXO