I'm still working my way through my notes from day 1 of the conference...
did I mention I have a lots of notes.
Actually, by my count, half-way through day 3, I've seen four very interesting announcements that are embargoed, two because of Nature/Science submission issues, which I will of course honour, and two because the people involved asked us not to discuss the results - so I won't;
and anyway, Ingrid would beat me up if I leaked the latest at this stage...
So, what do we have...
Back to California-Carnegie-AAT team, and JJ reiterates results announced at the AAS on planets around giant stars - they have 3 confirmed jovians, with 4 more candidates.
High percentage of stars observed have planets, and all are in orbits > 0.8 AU
The East Asian Planet Search is also looking at giants and Sato reports more detections, the have a detection around a K giant in an open cluster and several candiates around field giants.
They also see no close in planets, their cutoff looks like 0.7 AU and they say they could see planets down to 0.4 AU (inside of that planets are being swallowed by the giant atmosphere). Puzzling.
Several of their candidate giants hosts are metal poor, to the extent metallicity can be reliably measured of course.
The Penn State-Poland survey also reports, they have several detections and 30(!) candidate planets around a selection of field K giants; again long orbital periods.
I've seen a lot of that data, and it looks good, more planets to come.
ok, that is the end of the second morning session of day 1 of the conference - good break point.
Phew. No wonder I'm tired.
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Is this the start of the flood, where we get to the point that planets simply become statistics?
Thanks for the updates, Steinn, you're making me wish I was there to see it all unfolding myself. (Plus there are worse places in the world to hold a conference :))
I think we have already passed that point tacitus. There have been several discoveries that have not received much attention from the press at all over the last few years. This is unlike the situation in the immediate few years after 1995, although admittedly, discoveries then came in a slow trickle rather than the flood as they do.
I guess for those in the astronomical community and astro buffs (like myself) alike this is quite an unfathomable phenomenon. It seems only but yesterday when we were still speculating e.g. if indeed Barnard's Star has Kamp's 2 long period Jovians but no confirmed planets.
But whatever the changed perceptions, people like us will continue to be intrigued irregardless I think.
Anyway keep up the excellent work Steinn and all, people like yourself and J. D. Kirkpatrick (I'm also into Brown dwarfs a lot) are who we need to persist in pushing the limits, to uncover even more interesting finds. Hmmm any bets anyone as to when the first binary planets will be located? Or anyone knows if amongst the 250 odd exoplanets we already know of, there are any suspect binary planets? Also personally, it'll be fascinating if any team turns up one or several old free floating planets or planemos residing in the backyard of the solar neighborhood. Who knows (?) perhaps, one may lurk at just the right distance to be the long sought after Planet X or if it is substantially more hefty, a companion star or companion "star" ( if it is a BD). These are what keeps people like us going.
I was actually quite surprised when I started going back over my notes at just how much there has been at the meeting.
We are definitely in the "statistical" phase for the ordinary planets, but as the sample increases we are also getting more and more outliers, and some of those will break into the main stream media.
There are several free floating planetary candidates already, very hard to confirm, because without age determination their mass is very poorly constrained.
There are very likely binary planets alreay in the samples - either planets with large moons, or geniune co-orbital binaries.
There are lots of ideas for how to extract those from the data, but it requires a lot of very high quality long time data series
there were some interesting "planet X" related speculations on day 3, I'll get to those soon.
Don't know how quickly I can transcribe and summarise my notes, might take well into next week at the pace I'm going and we still have a whole day to go
Fun meeting, lots of interesting future plans as well, that is the main topic today