Message from the President


Astronomy is an observational science in the sense that almost all major advances in astronomy were and still are observationally motivated. When people think of astronomy, they usually imagine a big telescope and pretty, colorful pictures of various space objects. However, even the prettiest picture is only a first step toward a true understanding of physical processes that shape an observational appearance of stellar and interstellar, dense and diffuse, luminous and dark matter. Except for a few bodies of the Solar system, direct experimental studies of astronomical objects (including the Universe as a whole) are impossible, and we need to rely heavily on physical models, expressed as mathematical equations, to grasp underlying reasons for a specific observational result.

In an overwhelming majority of cases these equations are too complicated to be solved analytically, and in all these cases we resort to numerical modeling. What had started long ago as Kepler's hand-written tables now has developed into the vast field of computational astrophysics. This field has now reached a great success of its own as a powerful theoretical basis to study astrophysical processes (including the art of producing pretty pictures). It is now also a mandatory tool both to prepare and to analyze ambitious observational programs. Numerical models are therefore at the heart of most astrophysical domains and at all scales, from planetary atmospheres to cosmology. In fact, we can count computational astrophysics as a third discipline, complementing observations and theory.

Commission B1 Computational Astrophysics started at the 2015 General Assembly. As a current President of the Commission B1 I invite all of you to participate in the work of the Commission to increase the level of the discipline (that is absolutely necessary just to follow the more efficient computers), and to use the prediction power of computational astrophysics as a discovery tool for astronomy.

Dmitrij V. Bisikalo
(Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences)