by Ira Polans, Program Chair

Hope you and your families had a happy holiday season!

Featured Speaker The January meeting of the AAAP will be held on the 14th at 7:30 PM in the auditorium of Peyton Hall on the Princeton University campus. The talk is Eying the Sun: Our Nearest Star by Bin Chen Associate Professor of Physics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Our nearest star, the Sun, is not as benign as it may appear. The tangled and dynamic magnetic field in the Sun’s atmosphere produces many fascinating phenomena, which include massive solar flares and coronal mass ejections that influence the space environment, known as “space weather”. In this talk, Dr. Chen will give a brief overview of our unresting Sun and the related space weather impacts. Selected recent advances in understanding solar flares and coronal mass ejections will be presented.

Dr. Bin Chen is Associate Professor in Physics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). Prior to that, he held an appointment as an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and as a postdoctoral fellow at NJIT. He obtained a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Virginia in 2013. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2017 and the NASA Living-with-the-Star Jack Eddy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2013. Chen’s research focuses on solar high-energy phenomena associated with explosive events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections by using radio and multi-wavelength observations. He is a core member of NJIT’s solar-dedicated radio observatory: the Expanded Owens Valley Solar Array. He also utilizes some of the world’s premier general-purpose radio facilities including the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) for solar studies.

10-Minute Member Talk After the break Bob Vanderbei will share some of his images from the recent November 11 Mercury transit. If you’re interested in giving a future 10 minute talk please either email me at program@princetonastonomy.org or speak with me during an upcoming meeting.

Meet-the-Speaker Dinner There will be a meet the speaker dinner at 6 PM at Winberie’s in Palmer Square prior to the meeting. If you are interested in attending please email me by noon on January 14 at program@princetonastonomy.org.

February’s Speaker We’ve scheduled a talk on the Parker Solar Probe for the February meeting.. The speaker will be David McComas, Vice President of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Please help spread the word about this upcoming talk!