A good chunk of my research group plus myself spent last week in Krakow/Poland at the annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS). First time for me: we all took a “Eurocity” train that goes directly from Berlin to Krakow and takes 7 hours. Ecofriendly, and I was actually less wrung out after the train trip than I would have been after two flights (since there are no direct plane connections between Berlin and Krakow). The conference itself was…
Last week a huge delegation from my group attended the international Heraeus-Seminar “From the Heliosphere to Astrospheres – Lessons for Exoplanets and their Habitability” in Bad Honnef, Germany (conference website). We had contributed talks given by my group members Judy Chebly and Nikoleta Ilic, plus contributed talks by my group’s guests Yu Xu and Florian Rünger; posters given by Eliana Amazo-Gomez and Joana Wokittel; and three (!) invited talks by Ekaterina Ilin, Julian Alvarado-Gomez and myself. Unfortunately I became sick…
My group is involved in two instrumentation projects that presented updates at the recent SPIE conference: the ANDES spectrograph for the ELT, where we at the AIP are responsible for the design and the construction of its UBV arm; and ARCUS, a concept for a high spectral resolution X-ray space telescope, where I am involved in the exoplanet science goals. The SPIE proceedings for both projects can be found here: Marconi et al., “ANDES, the high resolution spectrograph for the…
This year the Cool Stars conference – the most important conference for the stellar half of my group’s research – took place in person again, for the first time since the pandemic started. Toulouse hosted the meeting this year, and it was a really good conference, lots of new scientific insights. A pretty big delegation from my group attended: PhD students Laura Ketzer, Ekaterina Ilin, Nikoleta Ilic, Judy Chebly, and guest student Yu Xu; postdocs Eliana Amazo-Gomez and Julián Alvarado-Gomez;…
The AIP is part of the ANDES consortium, with ANDES being the planned high-resolution, wide wavelength coverage spectrograph for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). The AIP is in charge of developing and building the UBV spectrograph of ANDES, and I am leading the UBV development as the PI. The whole ANDES spectrograph will have at least three individual spectrographs, one covering the UBV bands, one covering RIZ, and one covering YJH. An additional K-band spectrogrpah is still under discussion. ANDES…
This week I am organizing the XMM-Newton 2021 virtual workshop on the topic of “A high-energy view of exoplanets and their environments” as the chair of the Scientific Organizing Committee. We have over 350 participants, which is fantastic! The program and workshop website is here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/2021-workshop The conference proceedings will be peer-reviewed and published in Astronomische Nachrichten/Astronomical Notes.
Because Zenodo sometimes give a too-many-requests error during the conference, here’s a backup of my conference poster:
This week the Exoplanets III is taking place – it has been moved from Heidelberg into a virtual format because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I’m really excited about this particular conference, because it looks like a really well thought-out way to do an online conference, with all talks being available as videos for non-synchronous viewing, interactive online posters, and active discussion on Slack. Several of our group members are presenting their work: PhD students: Laura Ketzer: Poster “Using PLATYPOS to…
This summer the Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems and the Sun had its 20th anniversary, and took place in Boston. This is my favourite conference series, and this year I was really excited because I had the honour of being an invited speaker. I gave a talk on “How planets affect cool stars”, and had a lot of good interactions with people about the science of stars and exoplanets. This was the first time I’ve given an invited…
I was invited to give a talk on “How Stars and Planets Interact: a Look Through the High-Energy Window” at the XMM-Newton 2018 Science Workshop with a focus on X-ray time-domain astronomy. As always, had some very nice interactions with the colleagues at ESAC in Madrid. It’s interesting to hear what’s new in all the other subfields being probed by soft X-rays.