Astrobites@Anchorage: Wednesday Morning Sessions

A collection of thoughts about AAS events throughout Wednesday morning.Categories: Current EventsTags: AAS220, astrophysics, radio astronomy(Click to read more...)

Astrobites is again liveblogging AAS! In order to avoid inundating our readers’ RSS feeds, we’ll be updating this post with short paragraphs about the talks we’ve heard and posters we’ve seen. So keep checking back throughout Wednesday morning!
Monday morning sessions
Monday afternoon sessions
Tuesday morning sessions
Tuesday afternoon sessions

10:00 am Press Conference – Exoplanets
In a study of 152 stars with 226 transiting planets, 170 of which are smaller than Neptune, Lars Buchhave (Niels Bohr Institute/StarPlan, University of Copenhagen) and his collaborators found that small, close-in planets can form around metal-poor stars, whereas close-in Jupiter-size planets only form around stars at least as metal-rich as the sun (see the letter in Nature magazine / interactive pdf). In this context “metal” refers to any element other than hydrogen and helium. Metallicity is measured by the abundances of iron and hydrogen as compared to solar values. The stars studied range in metallicity from [Fe/H] = -0.6 to 0.6 (solar metallicity is 0.0), meaning that these stars contain anywhere from 1/4 to 4 times as much iron per mass as ...