The current Working Group on Active B Stars (WGABS) was established under IAU Commission No. 29 at the IAU General Assembly in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1979. Its main goal is to promote and stimulate research and international collaboration in the field of active B stars. Originally known as the Working Group on Be Stars, its name was changed at the 22nd IAU General Assembly in The Hague, Netherlands in 1994 when the research interests of the group were broadened to include activity in all B stars, especially pulsating OB stars, interacting binaries, stellar winds, and magnetic fields.
The WGABS publishes the Be Star Newsletter. Since 1980, The Be Star Newsletter has become a main source of information on new discoveries, ideas, manuscripts, and meetings on active B stars. The online edition, published since 1994, is updated as soon as new submissions are accepted. When an edition is finalized, a pdf-version is created and distributed.
The WGABS is open to all researchers interested in the field. Elections to the Organizing Committee of the WGABS are held every three years, individual terms are usually for six years.
The new WGABS website was created to foster communication between researchers. The communication is realized by the newsletter, the forums, weblinks, and RSS-feeds.
- The editorial principles of the newsletter remain unchanged, it will continue to be a refereed source of information.
The archive has been completed to cover all issues electronically.
Some sections are being made more prominent in the electronic edition. At this point these are only the job offers, but others, like meetings, may follow.
- The forum has several sections, meant to discuss scientific topics, working group topics, and general and site-related topics.
The scientific section has subsections dedicated observing requests and alerts on active objects, as well as a presentation archive. We invite colleagues to submit links to video recordings of their presentations, or the presentation material itself. For now we are limited to linking to such material only, in the near future we hope to be able to actually host such data on our server. The Questions & Answers sections is meant for interested students and amateurs mainly.
The Working Group section is to meant to discuss issues like the Newsletter itself and newsletter articles, or WG intitatives
- The weblink part strongly relies on the community, we encourage all colleagues to submit weblinks they consider of interest to the community to our list. Submitted weblinks are sent to the online editors, who will put them into the list. The categories for weblinks currently are Data and information Sources and Institutes & Researchers, but can be extended as needed.
- The RSS feeds, Be Star Publications Feed and Magnetic Star Publications Feed are reprocessed recent entries from the ADS database, looking for special keywords. Ideas for more feeds or more suitable sets of keywords to provide a better filtering are welcome. For technical info, see how these meta feeds were constructed with Yahoo-pipes.
Please let us know any suggestions for other services in the suggestion box.
Registration
To register, pleaae use the link in the navigation sidebar to the left. After submitting the registration you will will receive an email requesting to confirm your registration. Then the administrator will activate your account, typically within a working day.
Some technical remarks
- With the move to a new server, most problems were solved. In particular
- Accented character display correctly now
- Forum avatar images work properly.
- Image uploads to the forum work properly.
- A new section, Talk recordings has been added, as announced already for the first release of the site.
- This platform, joomla, is highly flexible, so if there anything that should be done different that is most likely possible with just a few clicks in the admin's configuration panel. For instance, there could be an event calendar to register meetings, announce talks that might be available as streams etc. However, I am not sure whether this would find enough users. Opinions welcome!