The restless nature of AGNs

It is widely accepted that variability provides important information on the nature of the emission mechanisms and the geometry of the central source in Active Galactic Nuclei. This is an exciting time in the field of AGN variability, due to the wealth of new results produced in the last few years. This conference intends to focus on radio-quiet sources, discussing our current understanding of the central source variability across the IR, optical, and UV regimes up to hard X-rays, and the clues that variability provides about the physics and structure of the AGN phenomena. The contributions are intended to address the problem of AGN variability both from the observational and theoretical point of view, on short and long time scales, presenting results and expectations from wide-field/deep surveys, pointed observations, ground-based and space observatories.

Topics:

•X-ray flux and spectral variability

•Outflows and SED variability

•The UV-X ray connection

•Variability on the optical band: reverberation, the continuum and the full sky surveys

•AGN variability analysis methods

•Variability in MHD simulations of accretion flows

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Radio Astronomy in the LSST Era

NRAO will host a 2 ½ day workshop to explore the landscape of radio wavelength observations in an era in which the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is producing thousands of nightly alerts and developing a deep, multi-color view of the sky.  Radio wavelength observations will provide independent, complementary views of the sky, and they will be crucial for full exploitation of the LSST data products.  The workshop will be structured around the science themes of time domain radio astronomy and radio complements to multi-wavelength sky surveys, leading to the identification of emerging scientific and technical capabilities needed for conducting observations in these areas.  The workshop will be focused around invited talks covering key areas, but there will also be ample opportunity for contributed talks, posters, and discussion. A goal of the workshop is to produce a community document summarizing the outcomes, the range of observations, and needed capabilities. The workshop will be held in Charlottesville from May 6 to 8, 2013.