The 2014 year has brought much excitement in the field of extrasolar planets and 2015 is set to be at least as exciting as the past year: new powerful adaptive optics systems are searching the northern and southern skies for new exoplanets and Kepler2 should start bringing a large number of new planet candidates!
Just after Christmas my family took a break and visited the Grand Canyon, just a few hours drive from Tucson. I took the pictures from the South Rim’s Mather Point. Amazing to think how, in just about 5-10 million years, the apparently small Colorado river eroded away one vertical mile of rocks deposited over 1.8 billion years!
Back to the field, the first week of January also brings along the largest US meeting of professional astronomers, the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society. This year astronomers are gathering in Seattle and we can take for certain that during the course of the next week there will be exciting announcements every day.
The large AAS meeting will be preceded by the open meeting of the NASA Exoplanet Analysis Group, where many in our field gather to review progress in exoplanet research and plan the next steps. The meeting will be broadcasted live, so you can watch it even if you are not in Seattle!
I wish everyone an exciting new year!
