The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is a US society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC. The main aim of the AAS is provide a political voice for its members and organise their lobbying.
The group was founded in 1899 by the efforts of George Ellery Hale. The constitution of the group was written by Hale, George Comstock, Edward Morley, Simon Newcomb and Edward Pickering. These men plus four others were the first Executive Council of the society, Newcomb was the first president. The initial membership was 114. The AAS name of the society was not finally decided until 1915, previously it was the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America.
The AAS today has over 6,500 members and five divisions - the Division for Planetary Sciences (1968), the Division on Dynamical Astronomy (1969), the High Energy Astrophysics Division (1969), the Solar Physics Division (1969) and the Historical Astronomy Division (1980).
The AAS awards several prestigious prizes annually. Among these are:
At a meeting here of the AmericanAstronomicalSociety, scientists monitoring the X-rays said evidence is building for a theory that the cycle is caused by a smaller stellar companion.
Astronomers plan a worldwide effort to observe Eta Carinae in all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to visible light and on up to gamma rays, from the ground and from space.
The halo is a vast and sparsely populated sphere of stars that surrounds the main disk of the Andromeda galaxy.
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