Briefing: Exoplanets

Monday afternoon's briefing, "Exoplanets: From Exhilarating to Exasperating," featured four speakers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, now in its third decade as a hotbed of exoplanet research. Ofer Cohen reported on rates of large flares in old Sun-like stars and the implications for the habitability (or not) of any planets orbiting such stars. Gongjie Li explained why the planets orbiting Kepler 56 are doomed. Lars A. Buchhave identified a possible new class of exoplanets bigger than super-Earths but smaller than mini-Neptunes. Then, as if on cue, Dimitar Sasselov unveiled the first discovery of such a "mega-Earth."