Last week I was a guest at the Anton Pannekoek Intitute at the University of Amsterdam for two days and gave an invited colloquium. Also learned a lot about the research going on at Amsterdam, especially in the exoplanet groups of Birkby and Desert. Title and abstract of my talk:

Strange beasts in the exoplanet zoo

Almost all exoplanets known today are orbiting around cool stars. This is caused by certain biases in our planet detection methods, but nevertheless it means that almost all exoplanets we can study today live in a system where the host star displays magnetic activity, which is ubiquitous amongst cool stars. As exoplaneteers, we care about stellar activity due to a variety of reasons: stellar activity can drive mass loss of planets; it likely influences the habitability of a planet; and it can make the detection of planets much more difficult, depending on the stellar properties and the techniques used. I will talk about several interesting projects going on in my group, concerning the field of cool stars and exoplanets – there will be news about magnetic activity in close star-planet systems, the decline of stellar activity in cool stars, and strange transit signatures around young and active stars.