Together with my colleagues at AIP, and led by Engin Keles, a PhD student in my Star-Planet Systems group, we have published a paper on the detection of potassium in the atmosphere of a Hot Jupiter using high-resolution transmission spectroscopy.
This is an exciting result because not all Hot Jupiters have potassium detected in their atmospheres, even when they have detections of the similar element sodium. The data will be used to gain more insight into the atmospheric chemistry of Hot Jupiters. LL41 Together with many colleagues, I have contributed to a White Paper on a possible X-ray Interferometry mission. X-ray interferometry can yield amazing spatial resolution for bright X-ray sources, even though there is still quite some technology to be developed.
For stars and exoplanets, we could spatially resolve transits in front of the stellar corona — see the conceptual image I made for the White Paper. Uttley and 26 co-authors including K. Victor Silva Aguirre was the one who brought us all together with his idea to come up with a program that focuses on all the new insights that the stellar and planetary field can gain from TESS and Gaia data. My office has a view onto a little slice of the ocean, just behind the palm trees:.
I really liked the KITP policy that all of their conferences have one third of questions time. So every talk was 20 minutes plus 10 minutes questions, and that led a really lively and interesting discussions, and just just by the same few people that always ask questions at other conferences.
I brought my family along, and we stayed in the KITP residence, which has very good spaces for people with kids. We had a lot of great barbecues with the other program participants, and also managed to spend a bit of time at the beach.
