Prague is a city in the heart of Europe where astronomers and
physicists have shaped the knowledge of mankind throughout history.
Starting from medieval astronomers building the famous Prague astronomical
clock, footprints of many famous astronomers and physicists may be found
within the historical walls of Prague.
Renaissance astronomer Tycho Brahe served in Prague as the
Imperial Court Astronomer of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.
Using his unprecedentedly accurate data, Johannes Kepler discovered in Prague the first two of his laws of
planetary motions and formulated them in his manuscript Astronomia nova
(1609). In 1842, Christian Doppler, professor of the Prague Polytechnic, presented
his principle in a lecture to the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences for the first
time. A few decades later, Ernst Mach spent major part (28 years) of his scientific
career at Charles University in Prague where he also twice became a Rector.
In the years 1911–1912, Albert Einstein was a full professor at the same
university where he made several important steps towards the final formulation of
the theory of general relativity.
Another 105 years later and under such starry scientific
skies, the historical city of Prague will be hosting a modest gathering
of modellers and observers of dense stellar systems, the
MODEST 17
conference, to which you are most heartily invited.
Scientific topics:
Galactic centre / nuclear star clusters
Young star clusters and star forming regions
Stellar dynamics and numerical methods
Stellar populations in star clusters
Blue stragglers / stellar collisions and their products
Compact objects in star clusters
Astrophysical sources of gravitational waves
Dynamics of (exo)planetary systems in star clusters
New observational frontiers (LIGO, GAIA, JWST, FAST...)