Extreme Solar Systems VI: colour of planets

Still catching up on the Extreme Solar Systems conference...

Lots of interesting stuff on planetary atmospherics.
Models are currently mainly looking at mean temperatures (at the 5-10% level) and horizontal global heat transport. Clear need to incorporate vertical transport and chemistry.

Interesting suggestion by Fortney that titanium oxide may play significant role.
Also clear that the hot Jupiters are very black in the optical, with albedos of 5% or less, which is puzzling.
Clearly they are bright in the infrared.

Some interesting future projects planned - MARVELS is a Sloan survey extension to look at 10,000 or more star for planets, in groups of 50-100.

If anyone has $10M or so to spare, a copy of the HARPS spectrograph and a 2m telescope, taking 1-200 spectra per night of Alpha Cen B (and A) would be good enough to find Earth mass planets, in the habitable zone, IF they are there.
Clever concept from the Debra Fischer et al of the California group - high risk but very high payoff project, would need serious private funding.

Future spectrographs, like HARPS-North, ESPRESSO, PVRS and others should get below 1 m/sec, with ultimate goal of cm/sec resolution, which will push on detecting Earths around nearby stars.

Kepler mission is in good shape.
Following up and confirming transit candidates will be very hard work - require lots of instruments, telescope nights and manpower.

Harvard/MIT have an interesting mission concept - TESS - to do a bright star all sky transit survey.
Well thought out small mission, and they want to do it privately, not as a NASA mission.

If you have $10M to spare, there are worse things to do with it. Google has signed on as a minor partner apparently, so only a few more million to go.

Six mission concepts for coronographic observations ECLIPSE, EPIC, TOPS, NWO, TPF-C and SEE-COAST - the last is being submitted to ESA Cosmic Visions right about now.
All interesting but a bit differnet in concept, I'll say something about them later this summer.

SIM is still hanging in there, may be rescoped as a "Planet Finder" only at half the price.
Burns some very good science though.

Oh, and OGLE has a new microlensing planet detection - two planets in the same system!
Numbers look spectacular, formal paper and announcement should be Real Soon Now.

Interesting proposal for microlensing monitoring from space.