From super-Earths to brown dwarfs: Who’s Who?

The year 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the discovery of 51 Peg b, the first confirmed exoplanet around a Sun-like star. This detection has triggered extraordinary development in exoplanet research all around the world, through various observational techniques such as radial velocity variations, transit, microlensing, direct imaging and astrometry.

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Life on Earth and Beyond

The aim of the course “History and Philosophy of Astrobiology: The Origin of Life” is to give participants a thorough overview of the historical, philosophical and ethical questions arising in this field. It is co-organised by the Nordic Network of Astrobiology and the EU COST Action “Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth and in the Universe”.

Physics of Exoplanets: From Earth-sized to Mini-Neptunes

This conference will address the science of planetary interiors by combining recent observations of exoplanets, advances in planetary orbital dynamics, and discoveries in experimental and theoretical high pressure science. An emphasis will be placed on planets with radii up to 2.5 times that of the Earth.

Revolution in Astronomy with ALMA

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has been producing a growing number of impressive and scientifically compelling results as the most powerful mm/submm interferometer in the world. Held in central Tokyo, the aim of this four day conference is to highlight the most recent science results from ALMA obtained during the first three years of science operations, and to motivate future collaboration among researchers around the world.

Photonics for Planets

On 6th and 7th November 2014, Arcetri will host Photonics for Planets. The last 20 years have seen the study of planets flourish into a huge and diverse field. The key to the field has been a diversity of experiments which have enabled ever more precise measurements to be made. In particular, the field has been driven by the continuous improvements in radial velocity precise. The future development of field will be enabled by a number of new instruments in various states of realisation. This workshop aims to focus on the potential of photonic technologies to deliver high efficiency, small beam sizes without modal noise. These developments are likely to be crucial to the detection and characterisation of nearby Earth analogs.

The Brown Dwarf to Exoplanet Connection Conference

The Brown Dwarf to Exoplanet Connection Conference (or #BDEXOCON) will be held on the campus of the University of Delaware on October 23rd – 24th, 2014. The goal is to bring together researchers with an expertise in the atmospheres and formation of both both brown dwarfs and exoplanets for a lively discussion of the current, future, and overlap status of the fields.

Exoplanets with JWST – MIRI

The workshop is aimed on discussing the capabilities and techniques for characterising exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope, in particular with its MIRI instrument. The discussions will cover both transit spectroscopy and direct imaging, covering giant planets to rocky planets and their atmospheres.

Poster of the workshop

Living Together: Planets, Host Stars and Binaries

The scientific meeting will be organized in the city of Litomyšl, Czech Republic, on the week of September 8 – 12, 2014. The city will be honouring Zdenek Kopal, one of the foremost investigators of binary stars who was born in this city in 1914. A similar, smaller-scale conference in the same city took place in 2004 (http://var.astro.cz/kopal/).

Thirty years of beta Pic and debris disks studies

The outline of the conference is given below.

Context

• from IRAS excess to debris disks
• young associations

The beta Pic system 

• beta Pic properties
• gaz properties
• dust properties
• planet(s)
• formation and dynamical history

Physics and Evolution of Magnetic and Related Stars

The Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences will organize a traditional International conference “Physics and Evolution of Magnetic and Related stars” during the period from August 25 to August 31, 2014.