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Category: conferences

Conference: “Ages^2 – Taking stellar ages to the next power” ?>

Conference: “Ages^2 – Taking stellar ages to the next power”

I spent some time at a fantastic conference, “Ages^2 – Taking stellar ages to the next power” on Elba, Italy. It was a great meeting, with people from very different areas of astronomy coming together to share progress on measuring how old different kinds of stars are, which is a very fundamental and very difficult to solve question. I gave an invited talk on the topic of “Precise stellar ages as the key to exoplanet evolution”, and my PhD student…

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Conference “Atmospheres of disks and planets” at castle Ringberg ?>

Conference “Atmospheres of disks and planets” at castle Ringberg

I just spent a really exciting week at castle Ringberg in south Germany, where the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy held a conference on exoplanet formation and atmospheric composition. Lots of interesting discussions and new results. I was invited to give a talk on the topic of “Stellar activity and planet characterisation” – one of my favourite topics to talk about. My personal highlight of the conference was Yamila Miguel’s presentation about the latest results from the Juno mission: we finally…

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Exoplanets conference in Bonn ?>

Exoplanets conference in Bonn

This week I am in Bonn, Germany, to give an invited talk entitled “Interactions between exoplanets and their host stars” at the conference Exoplanets – Bridging the gap between theory and observations. The conference takes place at the beautiful historical Physikzentrum in Bad Honnef. Lots of interesting talks and posters, from planet definitions (and how we should change them) to upcoming observational missions and planet formation theory. Plenty of time for discussion with all participants!

TEDx talk about exoplanets in habitable zones ?>

TEDx talk about exoplanets in habitable zones

Last Saturday I was honored to be an invited speaker at the TEDx conference in Klagenfurt, Austria. I spoke about exoplanets in habitable zones, and how those may compare to what we know from our own solar system. It was an extremely interesting conference – other speakers included Mateja Jamnik from the University of Cambridge who talked about her work in artificial intelligence, Guy Standing from the University of London who discussed unconditional basic income and how it can change…

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Cool Stars 19 conference review ?>

Cool Stars 19 conference review

One of my favourite conferences, the Cool Stars Workshop, took place in Uppsala last week. My PhD student Rachel Booth presented her work in a talk at the splinter session on Stellar Magnetic Activity – her first talk at a conference! And she did great! A lot of interesting stuff is going on at the moment with the spin-down and decrease in magnetic activity of old cool stars, and it seems like there may be different trends of rotation with…

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XMM-Newton: The Next Decade workshop ?>

XMM-Newton: The Next Decade workshop

This week the XMM-Newton workshop is taking place in Madrid. XMM is still going strong 17 years after its launch to space! Although I couldn’t attend the meeting myself, some of my group’s work got showcased in the invited talks, specifically Jürgen Schmitt’s talk on “Exoplanets and their Host Stars”, where some of my tidal spin-up work was shown, and Beate Stelzer’s talk on “Cool Star X-ray Variability”, where the work of my PhD student Rachel Booth on age-activity relationships…

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Mission concept: X-ray Surveyor ?>

Mission concept: X-ray Surveyor

The X-ray Vision Workshop was held in DC in October last year, where a large group of astronomers including myself met to discuss the scientific potential of a new X-ray space telescope concept, The X-ray Surveyor. As part of the workshop we held a 2-hour brainstorming session on what kind of new scientific insights could come from this mission, and the results are now available in this publication: Allured et al. 2015, “X-ray Surveyor Discussion Session Results from the X-ray…

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UKEXOM conference ?>

UKEXOM conference

I attended the UKEXOM (UK exoplanet community meeting) in Exeter this week. Very interesting conference, and I finally got to know all the exoplanet people here on this side of the pond. A pretty big group from our University attended (8 people, not bad for our small but growing exoplanet group), including my PhD student Rachel Booth, for whom it was the first academic conference ever. She presented a poster about her work on improved stellar ages from activity measurements,…

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Conference posters ?>

Conference posters

I hate carrying poster tubes to conferences. They’re awkward and it’s an extra luggage item on the plane. Therefore I’ve started having my posters printed on fabric, so that I can just fold them into my suitcase or backpack without damaging them. The best quality I’ve achieved so far was with the fabric printing company “Spoonflower”; see this Astrobites post for details. However, they’re in the US and it takes at least 10 days to get the poster from them,…

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