Iso Surveys Of A Dusty Universe

Many of the ISO observers who assembled for this workshop at Ringberg c- tle met for the third time in the Bavarian Alps. At two previous meetings in 1989 and 1990 surveys were only a minor topic. At that time we were excited by the discoveries of the IRAS survey mission and wanted to follow it up with pointed observations using an observatory telescope equipped with versatile instruments. With the rapid development of detector arrays and stimulated by ISO’s Observing Time Allocation Committee, however, surveys eventually became an issue for the upcoming mission. In a review paper on “Infrared S- veys - the Golden Age of Exploration” given at an IAU meeting in 1996, Chas Beichman already mentioned that there are ISO surveys. They were at the bottom of his hit list, while the winners were future space missions (Planck, SIRTF, etc. ) and ground-based surveys in preparation (Sloan, 2MASS, DE- NIS, etc. ). He organized his table according to the relative explorable volume, calculated from the solid angle covered on the sky and the maximum distance derived from the detection sensitivity. Clearly, with this ?gure of merit, ISO, as a pointed observatory, is rated low. Applying the classical de?nition of a survey, i. e. to search in as large a volume as possible for new or rare objects and/or study large numbers of objects of various classes in order to obtain statistical properties, ISO was indeed limited.

Many of the ISO observers who assembled for this workshop at Ringberg c- tle met for the third time in the Bavarian Alps. At two previous meetings in 1989 and 1990 surveys were only a minor topic. At that time we were excited by the discoveries of the IRAS survey mission and wanted to follow it up with pointed observations using an observatory telescope equipped with versatile instruments. With the rapid development of detector arrays and stimulated by ISO’s Observing Time Allocation Committee, however, surveys eventually became an issue for the upcoming mission. In a review paper on “Infrared S- veys - the Golden Age of Exploration” given at an IAU meeting in 1996, Chas Beichman already mentioned that there are ISO surveys. They were at the bottom of his hit list, while the winners were future space missions (Planck, SIRTF, etc. ) and ground-based surveys in preparation (Sloan, 2MASS, DE- NIS, etc. ). He organized his table according to the relative explorable volume, calculated from the solid angle covered on the sky and the maximum distance derived from the detection sensitivity. Clearly, with this ?gure of merit, ISO, as a pointed observatory, is rated low. Applying the classical de?nition of a survey, i. e. to search in as large a volume as possible for new or rare objects and/or study large numbers of objects of various classes in order to obtain statistical properties, ISO was indeed limited.

The arrival of large submillimeter and millimeter-wave detector arrays opened a new window on galaxy formation and evolution. The major new facilities now being designed or constructed, such as ALMA (MMA) and the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), will soon be expanding the horizons even farther.The Conference on “Deep Millimeter Surveys: Implications for Galaxy Formation and Evolution” drew together the major international groups working on submillimeter and millimeter-wave galaxies to discuss their relation to other galaxies both near by and in the early Universe, the role of the LMT and other new facilities in advancing the new field, and the implications of the new results and models for our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution. The resulting compendium of reports on observations, simulations, theory and interpretation, and instrumentation is the first book to present the new millimeter view of the early Universe thoroughly in a single volume.

This book recounts results obtained via the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) on comets, in the close environment of pre-main sequence stars, in the interstellar medium, and in the final stages of stellar life, using molecular hydrogen, ubiquitous crystalline silicates, water and ices. ISO has enabled investigation of the fuelling mechanism of galaxies, and new understanding of luminous infrared galaxies and their role in shaping present galaxies and in producing the cosmic infrared background.

Quasars, and the menagerie of other galaxies with "unusual nuclei", now collectively known as Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN, have, in one form or another, sparked the interest of astronomers for over 60 years. The only known mechanism that can explain the staggering amounts of energy emitted by the innermost regions of these systems is gravitational energy release by matter falling towards a supermassive black hole --- a black hole whose mass is millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. AGN emit radiation at all wavelengths. X-rays originating at a distance of a few times the event horizon of the black hole are the emissions closest to the black hole that we can detect; thus, X-rays directly reveal the presence of active supermassive black holes. Oftentimes, however, the supermassive black holes that lie at the centers of AGN are cocooned in gas and dust that absorb the emitted low energy X-rays and the optical and ultraviolet light, hiding the black hole from view at these wavelengths. Until recently, this low-energy absorption presented a major obstacle in observational efforts to map the accretion history of the universe. In 1999 and 2000, the launches of the Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray Observatories finally broke the impasse. The impact of these observatories on X-ray astronomy is similar to the impact that the Hubble Space Telescope had on optical astronomy. The astounding new data from these observatories have enabled astronomers to make enormous advances in their understanding of when accretion occurs.

Editing the proceedings of a scientific meeting is not an easy task. Sometimes people who give an excellent talk do not send the manuscript by the deadline. However, this time, thanks to the punctuality of all the participants, we have this excellent volume for the workshop on mass losing pulsating stars and their circumstellar matter prepared in time. Almost all of the oral presentations including the summary are collected in this volume. We regret that we cannot put in this volume a few posters that we failed to receive before the editorial work. The workshop was planned as a small meeting with less than fifty attendants because the city of Sendai was far from the most of the active institutions. However, the number of submitted papers exceeded the SOC's expectation; many interesting contributions had to be scheduled in the poster session. Still, the oral sessions were so tight that many participants might have felt frustrated for the shortage of discussions. The organizers of the workshop have to apologize to the attendants for the inconvenience caused from such a happy underestimate about the size of the workshop.

A major fraction of star formation in the universe occurs in starbursts. These regions of particularly rapid star formation are often located towards the centers of host galaxies. Studies of this kind of star formation at high redshift have produced astonishing results over recent years that were only possible with the latest generation of large ground-based and space telescopes. The papers collected in this volume present these results in the context of the much firmer foundation of star formation in the local universe, and they emphasize all the important topics, from star formation in different environments to the cosmic star formation history.