Sky & Telescope article about the potential connection between stellar binaries close to the Galactic center and dusty objects

23 Oct 2025

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.

1 Dec

Registration Deadline Approaching

We would like to remind the Galactic Center community about the approaching deadline for participant & abstract registration, which is set to December 15th, 2025. For details, please follow this link for registration. In addition, we encourage the interested participants to apply for the IAU Travel Grant following this link. This grant is especially intended for junior scientists as well as scientists with insufficient funding from all over the world. The deadline for the IAU Travel Grant is also December 15th, 2025.
30 Nov

Cologne-Prague-Bonn meeting 2025

Cologne-Prague-Bonn (CPB) meeting took place between November 24 and November 28, 2025. CPB participants discussed topics concerning the dynamics in the dense nuclear star cluster environment as well as new observational results.
6 Nov

SOC member Bozena Czerny in Prague

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.
30 Oct

Meeting of the IAUS 405 LOC

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.

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Sky & Telescope article about the potential connection between stellar binaries close to the Galactic center and dusty objects

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Registration Deadline Approaching

Cologne-Prague-Bonn meeting 2025

SOC member Bozena Czerny in Prague

Meeting of the IAUS 405 LOC