11th sdOB Conference

Armagh is served by three airports:

• Belfast International (BFS)
• Belfast City (BHD)
• Dublin International (DUB)

Travel to Armagh from the airport is via bus, taxi or rented car. There is no train station in Armagh. The nearest one is in Portadown.

Delegates are responsible for ensuring their own eligibility to enter the UK and, if required, for obtaining the appropriate visa. The organisers will issue a formal letter of invitation to any bona fide delegates that require such a letter for visa or funding purposes. If required, please write to sdob11@armagh.ac.uk (Subject: sdob11 invitation) and provide your full name, institute, and contact details.

A block of 40 rooms has been reserved for the nights of Sunday 10 – Thursday 14 September at the Armagh City Hotel. The room booking is inclusive of full breakfast, free wifi, use of the leisure club, complimentary car parking, and VAT. To book a room, delegates must contact the hotel’s Central Reservations office on (+44)28 3751 8888 and choose option 1, or email reservations@armaghcityhotel.com. A credit/debit card number will be required to guarantee the booking. You must quote “Armagh Observatory” at the time of booking to qualify for the discounted rate. The block reservation will expire six weeks prior to the conference. Delegates wishing to stay additional nights should book early to avoid disappointment.

The Visit Armagh webpages offer more recommendations for accommodation, including self-catered options. You may find other options not listed on the above websites from Airbnb and booking.com.

Four low-cost rooms are available on the AOP site. These will be allocated strictly on the basis of financial need. Enquiries and circumstances should be sent to Aileen McKee (aileen.mckee@armagh.ac.uk) before June 11th.

On the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram subluminous O and B stars lie below the massive O and B stars on the upper main sequence, and above the upper (young) end of the white dwarf sequence. They are all evolved stars, mostly about half a solar mass, mostly converting helium to carbon in their cores, and mostly “stripped” of their hydrogen outer layers. Most have previously finished hydrogen-burning and become red giants, where a nearby companion star has removed their outer layers. Despite this general picture, there are many, many, other star histories that could make hot subdwarfs of different types, either as the product of a collision between two white dwarfs, as the remnant of a star that failed to become a red giant, or by means as yet unknown. The world’s largest telescopes including ESO’s VLT and SALT, and spacecraft including Gaia, Kepler and TESS are transforming our view of these often exotic stars, revealing peculiar surface chemistries, remarkable binary orbits and puzzling pulsation properties. sdOB11 will provide an opportunity to share latest progress and address unsolved problems.

Scientific Organising Committee: Simon Jeffery (chair), Valerie Van Grootel, Stéphane Charpinet,
Zhanwen Han, Maja Vuckovic, Stephan Geier, Annalisa Calamida, Thomas Kupfer, Brad Barlow,
Veronika Schaffenroth, JJ Hermes, Holly Preece, Andrzej Baran

Local Organising Committee: Marc Sarzi, Heather Alexander, Simon Jeffery, Gavin Ramsay, Sinead Mackle, Laura Scott, Aileen McKee, Ceara Ryan

• Stephane Charpinet
• Matti Dorsch
• Simon Jeffery
• David Kilkenny
• Marilyn Latour
• Jiangdan Li
• Zhenwei Li
• Jerry Liu
• Anthony Eugene Lynas-Gray
• Xiao-Yu Ma
• John Mora
• Roy Østensen
• Asish Philip Monai
• Thomas Rauch
• Eduardo Alfredo Arancibia Rojas
• Veronika Schaffenroth
• Laura Scott
• Wenchao Su
• Xianfei Zhang