Astronomical research in Asian Pacific region has been growing rapidly in recent years. However, most important papers have been published in well established existing journals in US and Europe because we do not have high impact international journals in this region. I review the current trends of the local journals of East Asian countries and propose to establish a new regional journal by combining domestic journals.

We report preliminary results of an on-going survey of optically selected barred galaxies with 12CO (J=1-0) line. The entire sample is composed of about 100 bright barred galaxies (BT≤13) with small inclination angle. Most of the galaxies are relatively nearby with receding speed less than 10,000 km/sec. In the first observing run, we have observed central parts of 18 galaxies and detected CO emissions from 5 galaxies (NGC521, 2525, 4262, 4900, and 7479). Most of these galaxies are not observed with CO previously, except for NGC7479 which has been studied at various wavelengths. The peak antenna temperature of detected galaxies ranges from about 30 to 300 mK.

The evolution of the stellar debris after tidal disruption due to the super massive black hole's tidal force is difficult to solve numerically because of the large dynamical range of the problem. We developed an SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) - TVD (Total Variation Diminishing) hybrid code in which the SPH is used to cover a widely spread debris and the TVD is used to compute the stream collision more accurately. While the code in the present form is not sufficient to obtain desired resoultion, it could provide a useful tool in studying the aftermath of the stellar disruption by a massive black hole.

We have examined consequences of strong tidal encounters between a neutron star and a normal star using SPH as a possible formation mechanism of isolated recycled pulsars in globular clusters. We have made a number of SPH simulations for close encounters between a main-sequence star of mass ranging from 0.2 to 0.7 M⊙ represented by an n=3/2 polytrope and a neutron star represented by a point mass. The outcomes of the first encounters are found to be dependent only on the dimensionless parameter n'≡ (m/(m＋M))1/2(rmin/RMS)3/2(m/M)(1/6), where m and M are the mass of the main-sequence star and the neutron star, respectively, rmin the minimum separation between two stars, and RMS the size of the main-sequence star. The material from the (at least partially) disrupted star forms a disk around the neutron star. If all material in the disk is to be acctreted onto the neutron star's surface, the mass of the disk is enough to spin up the neutron star to spin period of 1 ms.

We have detected a SiO maser line (v=1, J=2- 1) for 15 stars out of about 80 long period variables in the wide range of period. No new sources are detected; all detected sources are variables with period longer than 300 days; no evidence is found that the dust grains in the outer envelope have influenced on this line. The time variation of this maser line for 7 stars, T Cep, μ Cep, U Her, R Leo, R Lmi, U Ori, and R Ser is observed and compared with optical light curve at the same epoch of maser observation. No universial relation between the time variation and the optical light curve is found. It implies that the radiation from a central star does not much play an important role for the direct pumping of the SiO maser line.

We have conducted surface photometry of a spiral galaxy NGC4419, by making use of photographic plates in U, B, V and R-bands taken by 105cm Schmidt Camera at Kiso Observatory. Two dimensional surface brightness distributions as well as luminosity profiles along the major axis are examined in detail to decipher the morphological properties of the galaxy. Analysis of the color distributions of NGC4419 shows that B-V and U-B colors remain constant throughout the galaxy with a weak trend of blue bulge in B-V color. The blue bulge might indicate an active star formation in the nucleus of NGC4419. For a quantitative analysis of the luminosity distribution of NGC4419, the observed luminosity profiles are decomposed into bulge and disk components, assuming the bulge component to follow de Vaucouleurs γ 1 / 4 − l a w while the disk component is assumed to be exponential. The fitting generally fails at the central part and at the shoulder near r = 15' where bulge and disk components overlap. The failure at the central part cannot be attributed wholly by the seeing disk since the core-radius of the central plateau is much larger than the width of point spread function. The failure at shoulder could be due to the luminosities from the spiral arms.

Infrared emissions from spherical dust, clouds are calculated using quasi-diffusion method. We have employed graphite-silicate mixture with power-law size distribution for the dust model. The grains are assumed to be heated and cooled by radiative processes only. The primary heating source is diffuse interstellar radiation field. hut the cases with an embedded source are also considered. Since graphite grains have higher temperature than silicate grains, the observed IR emission is mainly due to graphite grains, unless the fraction of graphite grains is negligibly small. The color temperature of Bok globules obtained from IRAS 60 and 100 μ m data are found to be consistent with the dust cloud with graphite-silicate mixture exposed to average interstellar radiation field. The color temperature is sensitive to the external radiation field, but rather insensitive to the size distribution of the grains. We found that the density distribution can be recovered outside the beam size using the inversion technique that assumes negligible optical depth. However, the information within the beam size is lost for if beam convolved intensity distributions are used in deriving density profile.

Cores of globular clusters are an ideal place for close encounters between stars. The outcome of tidal capture can be stellar mergers, close binaries between normal stars (W UMa type), cataclysmic variables composed of white dwarf and normal star pairs, or low-mass X-ray binaries consisting of a neutron star and a normal star pairs. Stellar mergers can be the origin of blue stragglers in dense globular clusters although they are hard to observe. Low mass X-ray binaries would eventually become binary pulsars with short pulse periods after the neutron stars accrete sufficient amount of matter from the companion. However, large number of recently discovered, isolated millisecond pulsars (as opposed to binary pulsars) in globular clusters may imply that they do not have to gain angular speeds during the X-ray binary phase. We propose that these isolated millisecond pulsars may have formed through the disruptive encounters, which lead to the formation of accretion disk without Roche lobe filling companion, between a neutron star and a main-sequence star. Based on recently developed multicomponent models for the dynamical evolution of globular clusters, we compute the expected numbers of various systems formed by tidal capture as a function of time.