Conference Support: From Stars to Planets - Connecting our Understanding of Star and Planet Formation; April 11-14, 2007; Gainesville, FL

该奖项将为将于2007年4月11日至14日在盖恩斯维尔由佛罗里达大学主办的“从恒星到行星--连接我们对恒星和行星形成的理解”国际会议提供资金支持。这笔资金将用于研究生的旅行津贴，并邀请美国机构的演讲者参加会议。这次会议将把来自恒星和行星形成社区的研究人员聚集在一起，分享最近的研究成果，并帮助推动未来的项目，以测试和提高我们对这些过程的理解。这次会议召开之际，许多令人兴奋的结果出现在对恒星形成区域的大型调查中，这些调查也探索了原行星盘的形成和演化。与此同时，正在启动大规模调查，以改进已知的太阳系外行星系统的样本，有可能对行星形成和迁移的模型进行强有力的测试。作为会议计划的一部分，将在佛罗里达大学校园内的佛罗里达自然历史博物馆举行一场名为《星夜：恒星和行星的诞生》的公开活动，包括查尔斯·拉达的公开演讲、与会者的其他几次演讲、观星和天文馆之旅。会议演讲者的演讲将发布在会议网站上，这将为无法亲自出席会议的与会者和其他天体物理学家提供宝贵的电子资源。

This award will provide financial support for the international conference 'From Stars to Planets - Connecting our Understanding of Star and Planet Formation', to be hosted by the University of Florida in Gainesville on April 11 - 14, 2007. The funding will be used for travel grants for graduate students and invited speakers from US institutions to participate in the meeting. The conference will bring together researchers from the often separate star and planet formation communities to share recent research results and help motivate future projects to test and improve our understanding of these processes. The meeting comes at a time when many exciting results are appearing from large surveys of star-forming regions that also probe the formation and evolution of protoplanetary disks. At the same time large scale surveys to improve the samples of known extra-solar planetary systems are being initiated, with the potential to strongly test models of planet formation and migration. As part of the conference program, there will be a public event, 'Starry Night: The Birth of Stars and Planets' to be held at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the campus of the University of Florida, featuring a public lecture by Charles Lada, several other presentations from conference participants, star viewing, and planetarium tours.The presentations of the conference speakers will be posted on the conference website, which will provide a valuable electronic resource for the attendees and other astrophysicists unable to attend the meeting in person.