Thermonuclear bursts in Japan
  
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This June I visited Niigata, Japan for the 
14th Nuclei in the Cosmos meeting. This
biennial gathering attracts a mix of nuclear experimentalists, modelers,
and astrophysicists. I presented a poster on our thermonuclear burst
model-observation comparisons.
Following the meeting I stopped by
RIKEN in Tokyo, where members of the 
MAXI instrument team were the very 
generous hosts of a meeting of our 
International Space Science Institute
international team.
The Monitor of All-Sky X-ray Image (MAXI) instrument, deployed on NASA's
International Space Station,
has been continuously monitoring the X-ray sky for several years, and has
detected many rare, long-duration thermonuclear bursts, as well as transient
outbursts of known and new sources.
