The AstroStat Slog

A GLAST-related opportunity: A Summer Science Institute at SLAC on Cosmic Accelerators is scheduled for August 4-15 in anticipation of GLAST science, and the co-directors welcome participation by students, postdocs, and researchers (even those with no background in astrophysics). The registration deadline is July 31.

Invitation to SLAC Summer Institute 2008

Dear Colleague,
We are writing to you about the 36th SLAC Summer Institute to be held Aug 4-15 this year on “Cosmic Accelerators”. This school was planned largely in anticipation of the GLAST mission, a highly successful collaboration involving astronomers and physicists from all around the world. (The proposal of its primary instrument, the Large Area Telescope or LAT, came from an international team led by Stanford, LAT integration and initial testing took place at SLAC, and LAT data are received at the Instrument Science Operation Center at SLAC for processing.) As you may have heard, GLAST was launched on June 11 and has been operating very well. It is planned to release the first-light information while the Institute is in session, and we anticipate the first important new science results over the next year, so this yearтАЩs Institute is very well timed. With its large leap in capabilities, GLAST will make breakthrough observations of many classes of high-energy cosmic sources and has a very large discovery window for signals of new phenomena, including indirect detection of dark matter.

As two of the co-Directors of the Institute we believe that this will be an unusually timely opportunity for students, postdocs and seasoned researchers who wish to expand their research area (no background in astrophysics is required) and learn about the exciting science of GLAST as well as recent advances in X-ray and TeV astronomy and cosmic-ray physics. Accordingly we have extended the deadline for early registration till July 31.

Please pass on information about the Institute, which can be found at
http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/ssi/2008/default.asp
Sincerely,
Roger Blandford
Tune Kamae