Newsletter of the Chilean Astronomical Society

The Chilean Astronomical Society (SOCHIAS) has reactivated its Newsletter, which contains topics like news, articles and science highligts. The Newsletter, edited by Linda Schmidtobreick in both English and Spanish, contains two letters written by the current SOCHIAS President, Leopoldo Infante, who has emphasized in them the development of astronomy in Chile during the last 15 years.

"The Chilean astronomical community has had a spectacular development over the past 15 years", wrote Prof. Infante in a letter adressed to Tim de Zeeuw, the current Director General of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). "In this relatively short period of time, the community has grown from less than twenty to almost seventy active professional astronomers".

Proof of that is the next Astro-Engineering Center which will be built at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), where several astronomers are working on the SIMPLE project:  a high resolution spectrograph for ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).

Furthemore, the Newsletter announces the next SOCHIAS 2010 Annual Meeting -that will take place on January 18-20-, an International Workshop on Astrobiology (Astrobio 2010), and includes a review of the First National Astronomical and Astronautic Olimpycs. It also includes three science highlights, some of which were written by postdocs from the Departamento de Astronomía y Astrofísica (DAA) at PUC.

"Chile is on the verge of jumping into a new phase in astronomy. New astronomical facilities are being built or planned by international consortia in the North of Chile for the next decade. As a consequence, Chile will become, most likely, the most important astronomical center in the world", said Prof. Infante, who is a Full Professor at DAA.