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Paper on stellar winds blowing around our nearest exoplanet neighbour ?>

Paper on stellar winds blowing around our nearest exoplanet neighbour

A recent work led by our Schwarzschild-Fellow Dr. Julián Alvarado-Gómez shows through numerical simulations that our nearest exoplanetary neighbour experiences a space weather environment similar to our own Earth. The planet is Proxima Centauri c, a planet a few times the size of the Earth, which orbits our nearest stellar neighbour Proxima Centauri in a roughly 5-year orbit. From the abstract: A new planet has been recently discovered around Proxima Centauri. With an orbital separation of ∼1.44 au and a…

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New paper and press release: Discovery of a monster planet ?>

New paper and press release: Discovery of a monster planet

A timely discovery for Halloween: Our NGTS collaboration has discovered a “monster planet”, a giant planet around a very small star. This is very surprising, because barely any of those huge planets have been found close to tiny stars. We will have to re-think some of our planet formation theories. A neat press release has been published by Queen’s University Belfast: Monster planet discovery challenges formation theory, which gives the key points about the discovery in layperson’s terms. And here…

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Press release: Are we being watched? Tens of other worlds could spot the Solar System ?>

Press release: Are we being watched? Tens of other worlds could spot the Solar System

This is a week full of press releases: my other PhD student, Rob Wells, just published a paper in MNRAS about transit zones (places in the sky where an extraterrestrial observer could detect our solar system planets through transits). There are about 70 currently known exoplanet systems that are located in the solar system’s transit zones. None of those have any known habitable zone planets, but prospects of finding a habitable system with mutual transit visibility are good: the Kepler-K2…

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Press release: X-rays Reveal Temperament of Possible Planet-Hosting Stars ?>

Press release: X-rays Reveal Temperament of Possible Planet-Hosting Stars

My PhD student Rachel Booth has been working on X-ray data from several space telescopes and has published our findings in MNRAS recently: X-ray emission from stars quiets down with age much more dramatically than thought before (see here for more details about the paper). Now NASA has published a press release on Rachel’s research, here is the link: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/x-rays-reveal-temperament-of-possible-planet-hosting-stars.html. Some really nice results, and hopefully we’ll be able to collect more data soon and study this in even more…

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Public lecture on exoplanets ?>

Public lecture on exoplanets

I’m giving a public lecture “Exotic worlds: planets in other solar systems and what they might look like” in the lecture series of the Irish Astronomy Association (IAA) on March 1st 2017. The location is the Bell Lecture Theatre at Queen’s University Belfast, 7pm. There will be biscuits and tea afterwards. Here’s a synopsis of the talk from the IAA: Dr Poppenhaeger will talk about how astronomers discover planets in other solar systems, and show a few of the most…

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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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