The Man with No Time

Something a little bit different today - I've been on television! I've mentioned it briefly before, but my boss is the 'Head of the Science Team' for the new ESA PLATO mission. Since it was selected by ESA last month he's been very busy giving talks, presentations, and interviews about the mission. Yesterday he had the science team from the local BBC TV channel along to interview him about it for a short piece. Since he was getting a bit fed up with the whole thing he decided that it would be good for myself and Dave (one of his PhD students) to get involved too! I was a little nervous about it, as I've not had any interaction with the press before. But it turned out to be a lot of fun. The science reporter was very easy going, and made it seem more like a chat than an interview. He did give me one piece of advice, which was to finish my thoughts even if I stumble rather than trying to restart, as you can always edit and do retakes. Very much like ...

Something that we've been talking about a little bit at work recently is "why do we study exoplanets?'"It's an interesting question, and one to which different people give different answers. Everyone has their own motivation after all, and it's been fun to hear what people say. Ultimately though I, and apparently several other members of my group, think that many exoplanet researchers are lying to themselves and each other. Not to cause harm or detriment, but because we think that 'admitting' the real reason will make other astronomers sneer at us, or sideline our careers. It's not hard to see how that comes about; there's an attitude in professional astronomy that we should be in it for the love of the job itself, and that we should be heavily invested (often emotionally) in our particular topic. Leaving aside the rather pertinent point that that whilst a postdoc or PhD student that is, to some extent, dictated by what your boss/supervis...

Just a quick Astronomy related update today. This morning saw a notable achievement in the field of exoplanetary science - when the preprint ArXiv updated with new submissions, there were three papers from the WASP project (which I'm part of). Between them they detail the discovery of 13 new hot Jupiter planets, taking the total number of WASP planets up to 100 (although not all have been published yet, and there are many more in the pipeline as well). But more significantly, they took the total number of known exoplanets past the 1000 planets milestone! This is a fantastic achievement for a field that's not even twenty years old. The Kepler mission, now sadly departed, has of course greatly contributed to this total. Particularly in the regime of smaller planets, multiple planet systems, and more unusual systems. But the contribution of WASP cannot be underestimated; to date it still holds the greatest number of confirmed discoveries by a single project, and the amoun...

Some astronomy news today that I thought was too cool not to share. Astronomers have, for the first time, determined the colour of an exoplanet ! (I've linked to the free PDF preprint there, as the journal article itself is behind a paywall here ) Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a group led by astronomers from the University of Oxford observed secondary eclipses of the exoplanet HD189733. A secondary eclipse if the opposite of a transit event: the planet passes behind the star, leasing to a slight dimming of the total light from the system. In this case though, the group were observing the light that was reflected from the planet's atmosphere. Generally this is mixed in with light being given out by the planet thanks to its high temperature, but at the short wavelengths used for this work these 'thermal' effects are minimal, so the only light is the reflected starlight.  I'm very excited by this piece of science. A blue planet, with clouds made of part...

Time for another quick job-hunting update. After a fallow period for likely looking postdocs and non-academic jobs, there have been several all at once in the last couple of months.  I’ve applied to three separate jobs; two are academic, and one is an outreach job that I was actually alerted to by one of my friends.

After the discussion meeting that I blogged about yesterday, I got on a bus with lots of other scientists and went to Chicheley Hall for the associated satellite meeting. This was titled "Characterising exoplanets: the next decade", and was an invitation only event. There were however some bursaries available to allow early career researchers to attend, which covered the cost of room, board, and transport. Bursaries were supposedly awarded to researchers who were going to be at the forefront of exoplanet research over the coming decade, so I was a little surprised to get one; my supervisor obviously wrote an excellent letter of recommendation! In any case, there ended up being nine bursary students there. Some I'd met, and talked to, at the meeting in London, and they were all very friendly and approachable. We were all pretty excited to be there amongst some of the luminaries of the field, and looking forward to a bit more of an informal meeting, although we weren...

After my visit to the RLSS Speeds , the next stop on my whirlwind tour of the UK took me to London for a two day conference at the Royal Society. Titled "Characterising exoplanets: detection, formation, interiors, atmospheres and habitability", it promised to be an interesting look at some of the aspects of exoplanetary research that I'm not so in touch with or involved in. It was also the first conference that I'd attended since my visit to the SUPA Cormack Astronomy Meeting in November 2012. Ah, the Royal Society. Such a storied institution, and they've got impressive facilities too. (Credit: David Brown)