GC News

Bozena Czerny (Center for Theoretical Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences) visited the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. We had a fruitful discussion about accretion processes - from the Galactic center as a nearby example of a low-luminous system to highly-accreting quasars that are studied using reverberation mapping. Since she is a SOC member for IAU Symposium 405, we also discussed the issues concerning the scientific program of the conference and how to make it balanced taking into account different factors and criteria. 

On October 29 and 30 the members of the IAUS 405 Local Organizing committee met at the Masaryk University and at the Brno Observatory and Planetarium to check on the basic organizational items, such as the main venue and the venues for the accompanying social program. In addition, the ongoing participant registration and the IAU Travel Grant submission portals were also discussed. Some LOC members joined the meeting online. The LOC meeting was joined by a SOC co-chair Rainer Schödel (IAA-CSIC), who also gave a series of three lectures on the Galactic center region at the Masaryk University. 

Michal Zajaček (LOC and SOC IAUS405 chair) recently participated at the 22^nd meeting of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis. A popular article published in Sky & Telescope summarizes the main results concerning the discovery of the binary system D9 among known dusty objects close to Sgr A*, which was reported in Nature Communications in December 2024. Stefan Gillessen (MPE) and Smadar Naoz (UCLA) comment on the potential association of stellar binaries with the observed dusty objects, though other scenarios and explanations have also been proposed.