IAU Symposium No. 134 on Active Galactic Nuclei was hosted by the Lick Observatory, as part of the celebration of its centennial, for the Observatory went into operation as part of the University of California on June 1, 1888. Twenty years later, in 1908, Lick Observatory graduate student Edward A. Fath recognized the unusual emission-line character of the spectrum of the nucleus of the spiral "nebula" NGC 1068, an object now well-known as one of the nearest and brightest Seyfert galaxies and active galactic nuclei. Ten years after that, and seventy years before this Symposium, Lick...

This Symposium, the first devoted entirely to the measurement and the role of magnetic fields in the non-solar Universe, was held in Heidelberg, on June 19-23, 1989. The meeting began with review talks on magnetic phenomena near the solar photosphere, corona, and in stellar winds, since these nearby "laboratories," studied for many years, provide much of the prior knowl- edge of magnetic effects in astrophysical plasmas. The Symposium contained presentations of considerable new work concerning the role of magnetic fields in accretion disks, bipolar outflows, and related magnetic phenomena in...

Stellar flares represent one of the most challenging problems of contemporary astrophysics. Both solar and stellar observations have shown the flare phenomenon to be very complex, and in recent years important progress has been made from simultaneous observations over wide wavelength ranges. Some similarities exist between solar and stellar flares, but im- portant differences have also been established. Such topics, as well as theoretical aspects, were discussed in detail at the Palo Alto IAU Colloquium No. 104, Solar and Stellar Flares, in 1988. Another approach to the study of stellar...

Much of the excitement in modern Solar Physics has come from the realisation that the Sun is a plasma and that this plasma is interacting with the magnetic field in a wide variety of subtle ways. As well as being of great interest in their own right the observed plasma phenomena on the Sun are of much wider importance, since they reveal to us details of basic phenomena that are expected to be occurring throughout the universe. It was with this in mind that 173 solar physicists from 17 countries gathered together in Bangalore with an air of anticipation. We were not disappointed as we received...

The first ideas for the symposium were generated in Brussels in the summer of 1986, dur- ing exquisite lunches in between HST proposal consortium meetings. At the time it was expected that soon after the previous IAU symposium (No. 116) devoted to luminous hot massive stars, a bonanza of new exciting observational material would become available, together with significant advances on the theoretical front. Also it was felt that Wolf- Rayet stars should feature predominantly, because that had not been the case since IAU Symposium No. 99 in 1981. Tradition requires that IAU symposia on hot...

Papers of the Paris meeting in June 1990 on Local Group Galaxies, molecules in early-type galaxies, observations of spiral structure in molecular clouds, a comparison with other gaseous components and IR emission, interacting galaxies and starbursts, gas and star dynamics, galaxy evolution, IRAS ult

Proceedings of the 146th Symposium of the International Astronomical Union, held in Paris, France, June 4-9, 1990

Symposium 148 "The Magellanic Clouds and their Dynamical Interaction with the Milky Way" was the first IAU Symposium held in Australia since 1973. In all, 23 countries were represented by 149 participants. The Symposium was held from July 9 to 13, 1990 at Womens College, the University of Sydney. The last symposium on the Magellanic Clouds' was held in 1983 in Ttibingen, Germany. Since then new ground-and satellite-based instruments have become available. A range of results from these instruments were presented at IAU Symposium 148 and are published in these proceedings. IAU Symposium 148 was...

Highly ionized atoms in the general interstellar gas of the galactic disk were first detected through interstellar absorption line observations of 0 VI with the Copernicus satellite (Rogerson et al. 1973). Survey measurements by Jenkins (1978) of interstellar 0 VI absorption toward 72 stars demonstrated the general presence of 0 VI in the interstellar medium of the galactic disk. This researcIi. and parallel observational studies of the soft X-ra}' background (Williamson et al. 1974; McCammon et al. 1983; Marshall and ClarK 1984) provided direct evidence for the existence of hot low density...

This book contains the proceedings of IAU Symposium No. 151 Evolutionary Processes in Interacting Binary Stars, ' which was held from 5 to 9 August 1991 in Cordoba, Argentina.
The primary aim of this conference was to review and evaluate our current understanding of the evolutionary processes in wide variety of interacting binary stars from their births to their deaths. Subjects included the formation of binaries, mass flow and transfer, accretion processes, and binaries with collapsed components, such as novae, X-ray binaries and binary pulsars. As the field covered is both broad and...