XMM-Newton: The Next Decade workshop ?>

XMM-Newton: The Next Decade workshop

image credit: ESA
image credit: ESA

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 for old main-sequence stars was mentioned. Go XMM!

Mission concept: X-ray Surveyor ?>

Mission concept: X-ray Surveyor

from Allured et al. (2015)

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 Vision Workshop”, link to ADS.

The format of the brainstorming session was inspired by the “WISE at 5” workshop (Faherty et al. 2015) and kindly led by Jackie Faherty. Also, it was good fun to have 50 astronomers all chatting science at the same time!

UKEXOM conference ?>

UKEXOM conference

Rachel next to her poster at UKEXOM
Rachel and her poster!
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, and she did a great job!

Research visit: Edinburgh and St. Andrews ?>

Research visit: Edinburgh and St. Andrews

I’m on a research visit to Scotland this week. I’m giving the lunch talk at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh and the exoplanet seminar talk at the University of St. Andrews. Talk title and abstract:

“Understanding exoplanets and their stellar environment”

Exoplanets do not exist in a vacuum, they are embedded into the environment created by their host stars, which means that they are affected by radiation fields, stellar winds, and magnetic phenomena. Since we aim to understand how exoplanets evolve over time, and especially how their atmospheres, chemistry, and potential habitability develop, we need to investigate the stellar behaviour. I will discuss recent results concerning exoplanets and the stellar environment: 1) how we can use stellar activity measurements for old main sequence stars to estimate ages of exoplanet systems more reliably; 2) how stellar activity can be modified by Hot Jupiters through tidal and magnetic interactions; and 3) if megaflares on M dwarfs occur often enough to have a significant on habitability on exoplanets in the nominal habitable zone.

I also had some time to walk around Edinburgh, so I walked up Carlton Hill to see the old city observatory.

Edinburgh_CarltonHill_smaller

Conference posters ?>

Conference posters

UKEXOM_Poster_Mando_bI 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, so that’s often a no-go for me. The second best and completely okay option I’ve found is having the poster printed on canvas by a local print shop, like they do with photos if you want to hang them on the wall. For personal reference, I use “Canvas Express”, they print on A1 with some extra white space around (which looks fine even compared to A0 paper posters), link. The posters fold up fine and the lines are gone ca. 30 minutes after putting them up. Plus, they make a pretty good cat toy afterwards.