Extreme Solar Systems VII - extreme habitability

Extreme Solar Systems conference has finished, and the lovely WiFi service at Athens airport just crashed and wiped out what I wrote... aargh.

Hrmph, the previous version was much snappier and comprehensive, with amusing and informative hyperlinks.

Ok, before my battery runs out, here goes...

Lots of new instruments coming online.
Some new dedicated or semi-dedicated planet hunting telescopes.
Good prospects for near future space missions.

Shortage of time for followups. we're probably missing stuff because of slow followup and poor cadence on good targets, this will get much worse as discovery pace accelerates and we find "harder to observe systems".

Shortage of telescope time, money and people. Need more observations, analysis and theory.

Highlight of final day: lots of planets around binaries, may be only a narrow range of binary star orbital parameters excludes planets (in the habitable zone) - good since most of stars are binary members.
Book on planets in binaries coming out - collection of reviews, ed Haghighipour

Some stuff on planet characterisation - not enough biomarker people at the meeting, most of the atmosphere stuff was on hot Jovians.

Good talks from Sasselov's group at Harvard. Especially Valencia on habitability of super Earths.
The first order models show gross characteristics going the right way to improve habitability prospects, in particular plate tectonics work better with higher mass - get a carbon cycle and atmospheric feedback on long time scales.
Personal speculation: mantle subduction goes the right way to moderate surface water on volatile rich planets - the "ocean worlds" may mostly self-regulate to be shallow.

Fogg (of terraforming fame) gave a good talk on terrestrial plent formation after jovian migration.
Mardling has an elegant mechanism for pumping eccentricity (and forcing "bloating") for hot Jovians - already see several eccentric and/or bloated - needs a low mass (~ few Earth) mass planet in low eccentricity orbit exterior to jovian - as predicted by our migration models. Yay.
Naive perturbation theory requires higher mass external perturbers, which are ruled out by observation.
So eccentric or bloated hot Jovians may be markers for low mass planets in low eccentricity orbits exterior to the jovian! Cool.

Near IR imaging search started (UoAz) for high mass wide orbit jovians around all nearby M dwarfs (within 6 pc).
Bit of a fishing expedition since they are mostly old and therefore likely not IR bright, but worth a try.

Good summary talk by Doug Lin.

Final session was open panel discussion on "extreme habitability".
I chaired it, so I don't have notes, but someone did take notes and should send them to me soon.

Quite lively, no one dared get speculative on biological issues, and I managed to keep us away from anthropism for the most part...

My sense is that the trend is that we think planetary systems are common, that terrestrial planets are ubiquitous, and that a lot of stars may have reasonable planets persist for a long time in regions where liquid water or other stable chemistry will persist.
If life, or intelligent life, is rare, it is probably not for lack of planetary platforms.

Can't say for sure yet, but the trend is there.

Bit of discussion on broader biomarkers - energetics, chirality, isotope anomalies.
Even dyson spheres and artifacts, including chemical artifacts. Good stuff.

Fun meeting, well timed and good crowd.