I’m here at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC, which is poised to pop open like a scientific pinata starting Monday!  With over 2500 registrants, the AAS has billed this as “the largest meeting in astronomy history.”  The meeting is stuffed chock full of amazing astronomical announcements, many of which you’ll see making daily headlines all this week.  Check out the meeting’s long list of abstracts and topics. It’s going to be an especially great conference for exoplanets.  Tons of individual talks and posters  on everything from exoplanet atmospheres to the hunting of exo-moons.

I’ll be presenting my own poster on Tuesday on the research I’m doing with NOAO on searching for stars that have possibly “eaten” their planets (if you happen to be here, wander over to 423.12. Searching for Planetary Pollution: Stellar Parameters for 10 Stars with Planets. I’ll try and post a copy of the poster soon.Since I plan on concentrating in extrasolar planet and Kuiper belt research in grad school next year, I’m really looking forward to meeting and talking with the astronomers who are doing the cutting-edge research in the field.

But one big presser everyone’s waiting for is tomorrow’s big announcement from the Kepler mission about their first results.  Kepler’s new website was revealed just a few days ago, and it curiously now includes a “Kepler Planet Counter” on the side of the page.  It’s at 0 planets now, but that won’t last long!

Stay tuned – I’ll try and keep this space updated with all the cool stuff coming out of the hot Universe.

P.S.

Oh, and speaking of exoplanets and Kepler, check out Michael Koppleman and Mike Simonsen’s 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast “Kepler and Extrasolar Asteroids” with Kepler scientist (and Pittsburgh-area native) Dr. Steve Howell, whom I had a great time working with at NOAO last summer.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 11:16 am and is filed under astronomy, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.