The final conference of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie RISE project POEMS (Physics of Extreme Massive Stars, coordinated by Michaela Kraus) took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 24-28 June. The main goal of this conference was to disseminate the research results from the POEMS collaboration project, and to share them with the astronomical community. This international conference was hosted by our partner institute, Observatório Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, and was organized by the POEMS consortium. The scientific organizing committee was chaired by Dr. Marcelo Borges Fernandes from Observatório Nacional, Dr. Michaela Kraus from the Astronomical Institute Ondřejov, and Dr. Lydia Cidale from Universidad Nacional de La Plata.
The theme of the conference attracted a total of 73 participants from 16 different countries all over the world. Of these, 33 are actively involved in POEMS and the remaining 40 are non-POEMS members from the astronomical community working in diverse aspects of massive stars. The topics covered were fundamental parameters of massive stars, theory of stellar winds, modeling of stellar atmospheres and winds, Be stars, evolution of massive stars, diverse evolutionary states (blue and red supergiants, yellow hypergiants, luminous blue variables, Wolf-Rayet stars, supernovae), circumstellar environments, and massive star binarity across the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
The entire POEMS team of the Astronomical Institute actively participated at this conference. Michalis Kourniotis gave an invited talk and Péter Németh, Julieta Sánchez Arias, and the two PhD-students Suryani Guha and Kuljeet Singh Saddal had contributed talks. Michaela Kraus opened the conference with an overview presentation on the POEMS project and presented the conference summary together with Marcelo Borges Fernandes. In addition, Michaela Kraus, Dieter Nickeler, Olga Maryeva, Julieta Sánchez Arias, and Suryani Guha contributed to the preparation of nine poster presentations.
All talk and poster presentations are available to he community on the conference webpage. An impressive number of 50% of the contributed talks were presented by PhD-students, demonstrating a high interest in the next generation of astronomers in massive star research.
More information about the conference can be found here: https://stelweb.asu.cas.cz/MassiveStars2024
