Proposal for an international workshop on

MASSIVE STARS IN INTERACTING BINARIES


to be held in Quebec Province, Canada, 16-20 August 2004

Preamble:

Massive stars dominate the Universe via their extreme output in photons and particles, with far-reaching consequences. Interest in massive stars has waxed incredibly during the past few years, e.g. with the recognition that gamma-ray bursters are associated with massive stars or the spectacular discovery of copious carbon dust spiraling out from some WR stars, not to mention stellar cannibalism in the dense cores of young clusters. Also, it probably won't be long before we are systematically probing the Universe using massive (luminous) stars at very high redshift. And then there is gravitational-wave neutrino astronomy lurking on the horizon!

A large fraction of stars occur in binaries, including massive stars. Many different and intriguing effects are produced when massive stars interact in the close proximity of a binary (or other multiple hierarchy) system: colliding winds, variable X-rays, RLOF, .... Binaries are also a key source for obtaining masses and other stellar parameters. But how are these parameters affected by the presence of the massive star in a binary?

We believe that the time is right to have an intense workshop devoted uniquely to these problems. A workshop limited to massive stars in interacting binaries with 50-100 active scientists and students with plenty of time for open discussion would seem the ideal format to address these questions.

Following is a preliminary program:

MASSIVE STARS IN INTERACTING BINARIES

  1. Inventory:
  2. Basic parameters from binaries:
  3. Colliding winds:
  4. Formation:
  5. Evolution:
  6. Effect on dynamical evolution of dense clusters
  7. Effect on population synthesis
End of preliminary program

SOC

Paul Crowther pac@star.ucl.ac.uk
Norbert Langer n.langer@astro.uu.nl
Tony Moffat (co-chair) moffat@astro.umontreal.ca
Julian Pittard jmp@ast.leeds.ac.uk
Andy Pollock apollock@xvsoc01.vilspa.esa.es
Simon Portegies Zwart spz@science.uva.nl
Nicole St-Louis (co-chair) stlouis@astro.umontreal.ca
Dany Vanbeveren dvbevere@vub.ac.be
Ed van den Heuvel edvdh@science.uva.nl
Hans Zinnecker hzinnecker@aip.de