This conference will bring together researchers and students for the presentation and discussion of new advances in stellar astrophysics enabled by the latest generation of radio facilities operating from meter to submillimeter wavelengths. The general focus of the workshop will be radio emission from hot and cool stars during the main sequence and post-main sequence evolutionary phases. An underlying theme will be "radio stars as players in our Galaxy," emphasizing how radio observations provide an effective probe of the roles of various types of stars in the Galactic ecosystem and the interplay between stars and their environments.
This award provided financial support for the international workshop "Radio Stars and Their Lives in the Galaxy", held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Haystack Observatory on October 3-5, 2012. The workshop provided a forum for the presentation and discussion of new advances in stellar astrophysics enabled by radio wavelength observations. Radio emission has now been detected from stars in our Galaxy spanning nearly every known type and evolutionary phase. Studies of this radio emission provide unique insights into the workings of stars that cannot be gleaned from other wavelengths. For example, radio observations trace jets emitted by newly forming stars, reveal the presence of intense magnetic fields associated with some of the coolest known stars, and unveil trails of debris several light years across shed by dying red giant stars as they sweep through the Galaxy. During the past few years, the availability of a wide variety of new and upgraded observational facilities operating in the radio range (i.e., from meter to submillimeter wavelengths) has been leading to new discoveries in virtually every branch of stellar astrophysics. This motivated the organization of a workshop to bring together observers, theorists, and laboratory astrophysicists to exchange ideas on how to exploit these new developments to advance stellar science. A total of 50 participants from four continents and 13 countries took part in the Radio Stars and Their Lives in the Galaxy workshop. The program comprised a series of invited and contributed talks, posters, and discussion sessions.The intellectual merits of the workshop included the dissemination of knowledge through presentations and discussions and the opportunity to foster learning, cross-fertilization of ideas, and creative innovation through interactions between scientists working in several different branches of stellar astrophysics. In addition, the workshop provided a forum for the discussion of means to maximize scientific returns from several new or recently upgraded NSF-sponsored facilities, including the Jansky Very Large Array, the Very Long Baseline Array, the Green Bank Telescope, and the Atacama Millimeter/submillimeter Array. One of the broader impacts of the Radio Stars workshop was to provide the opportunity for students and postdoctoral researchers to learn from and interact with established leaders in the field of stellar astrophysics. In addition, a publicly available web site was created to showcase audio and visual materials from the meeting, and highlights from the workshop were summarized in a monograph published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (Matthews 2013).
