MOTIVATION AND PURPOSE

Recent years have seen much progress in the study of the basic mechanisms responsible for high-energy emission from astrophysical plasmas. From the wealth of data from observatories such as Einstein, EXOSAT, Ginga, IUE, ROSAT, EUVE, GRO, ASCA, SAX, RXTE and Yohkoh, it is now clear that many common physical processes are at work in different astrophysical systems. Magnetohydrodynamic processes, for example, play key dynamical roles in the solar corona and in accreting systems in active galactic nuclei (AGN) and Galactic compact objects. Magnetic reconnection processes, thought to be involved in heating of the solar corona, are expected to occur in accretion disks and neutron star magnetospheres. The physics of emission from highly-relativistic plasmas is critical to understanding jets from AGN, supernovae and the relativistic fireballs now thought responsible for cosmic gamma ray bursts. Plasma processes were also of crucial importance in the early universe, and affected the development of the primordial magnetic field and the development of structure.

Though similar physical processes are encountered by researchers studying compact objects, accreting sources, supernovae, the Sun and the early universe, researchers from these different subfields interact surprisingly little. The purpose of the proposed symposium is to bring together experts from different subfields of high-energy astrophysics who encounter common questions in their research. Our goal is to create a forum in which the participants can benefit from the expertise of others who have worked on similar problems in different astrophysical contexts. With launches of AXAF, XMM, ASTRO-E, HESSI, and ABRIXAS imminent, we expect that this conference, proposed for the summer of 1999, will form an ideal environment in which to discuss the exciting new results from these observatories.