[X] My Assistant

[helvick]

Hopefully this will be the start of a flood..

[Mongo]

From the Dynamics of Cats blog about the Santorini exoplanet conference:

Extreme Solar Systems highlights

"The Swiss group has 12 new planets, several with long ( > 2000 day) orbital period and apparent low eccentricities."

"There are now 13 known Neptune mass planets, with more candidates in the pipeline (30-50 candidates just in the HARPS data set)!"

Extreme Solar Systems II

"Texas group showed a recently announced double planet system around a low metallicity star, jupiter mass and half-jupiter mass at 200 and 500d orbital period, metallicity is -0.7 (or one fifth solar) - star is HD155359, a 0.9 solar mass star that is old (! 10 Gyrs)

I don't think the "Rare Earth" hypothesis is holding up well, the pieces of the argument are being dismantled wholesale as we find more systems and gain more understanding.

There are more low mass planets around K and M stars, but people are not announcing formally stellar identities until candidates are confirmed."

Extreme Solar Systems III

"The East Asian Planet Search is also looking at giants and Sato reports more detections, the have a detection around a K giant in an open cluster and several candiates around field giants.
They also see no close in planets, their cutoff looks like 0.7 AU and they say they could see planets down to 0.4 AU (inside of that planets are being swallowed by the giant atmosphere). Puzzling.
Several of their candidate giants hosts are metal poor, to the extent metallicity can be reliably measured of course."

"The Penn State-Poland survey also reports, they have several detections and 30(!) candidate planets around a selection of field K giants; again long orbital periods.
I've seen a lot of that data, and it looks good, more planets to come."

Extreme Solar Systems IV

"There are a couple of more transiting planets in the pipeline - sounds like there is another hot Neptune in the pipeline, and I hear the TrES group found another bloated (1.7 Jovian radii?!) hot Jupiter which was first announced at another meeting a week or two ago.

The COROT people are being very coy, won't even confirm their announced sensitivity, sounds like they have looked at the first data set but not pipeline reduced it, but there is buzz that maybe they think they have something interesting; this is probably overinterpreting natural scientific caution, but honestly, why be so coy if you aren't sitting on something big!"

Extreme Solar Systems V

"dynamicists have been playing with formation models, and there is a hint that we can match the observed systems - prescription is that systems form "crowded" - just pack in as many planets as can fit, then let there be some migration, resonant locking and planet-planet scattering, and what emerges has statistical distributions that are not too far off from what is observed.
Now, we could be missing a class of systems more like the Solar System where there was little gross scattering or migration, but probably some, and we are starting to see those systems now.

Ed Thommes had an interesting talk on extensions of his old models and the "Nice" models of Morbadelli et al.
Looks like the outer solar system, with late heavy bombardment, would have come together nicely if there was another Neptune out there to begin with.
So we let debris drag bring Jupiter and Saturn into resonance with a little bit of orbital migration, scatter Uranus and Neptune out (and use the debris to recircularise) and we get the details more or less right if we let a second Neptune have been there and been ejected, either to infinity or outer Oort cloud. Hard to accommodate a planet X that big in the outer system, but maybe possible."

Extreme Solar Systems VI

"Lots of interesting stuff on planetary atmospherics.
Models are currently mainly looking at mean temperatures (at the 5-10% level) and horizontal global heat transport. Clear need to incorporate vertical transport and chemistry.

Interesting suggestion by Fortney that titanium oxide may play significant role.
Also clear that the hot Jupiters are very black in the optical, with albedos of 5% or less, which is puzzling.
Clearly they are bright in the infrared."

"Oh, and OGLE has a new microlensing planet detection - two planets in the same system!
Numbers look spectacular, formal paper and announcement should be Real Soon Now."

This blog has multiple updates every day, I suggest keeping an eye on it.

Bill