Planets in Peculiar Places

5-6 April 2018 - University of Sydney

A two-day Planets in Peculiar Places Hunstead Workshop will be held at the University of Sydney from April 5-6 2018, covering all aspects of planetary systems not around main-sequence FGKM stars - from red giants to stellar remnants.

Exoplanetary science since 1995 has been dominated by a race to find the most Earth-like planets around the most Sun-like stars, but there are much stranger worlds in much more exotic systems than this. While we are beginning to have a clear picture of the formation and evolution of planetary systems around solar-like main sequence stars, we are in the dark about planets around more massive stars in their lives and various afterlives. The Sydney Institute for Astronomy is hosting a Hunstead Workshop to bring together the vibrant and diverse community beginning to address these questions, interleaving talks by observers and theorists, focusing especially on the Australian contributions to asteroseismology and transit searches (Kepler, TESS), radial velocity (e.g. Veloce, RHEA, Minerva), pulsar timing, direct imaging, and large spectroscopic surveys, and how we can tie these efforts together to understand the strange physics of planets in these peculiar places.

Participants are encouraged to give a short presentation on a specific research issue or to brief the workshop on the current research capabilities in exoplanet science or related topics in their departments.

There is no registration fee to attend the workshop. However, please indicate your attendance via the registration page, which includes the option to submit a title and abstract of the talk. While there will not be any official conference dinner, we encourage participants to keep the evening of April 5 free for social events. Registration deadline is 9 March 2018.

For social media users, the Twitter account and hashtag for this workshop will be @beyondfgkm and #beyondfgkm - we encourage participants to use these to communicate with the organizers and one another!