19-23 October 2009, Porto, Portugal

Conference Poster - Click to download an A3 PDF file [11MB]
To allow the discovery of other Earths, a new generation of instruments and telescopes is now being conceived and built by different teams around the world. This includes a new generation of Extremely Large Telescopes (ELT). Thanks to the diameter of their primary mirrors, the detection of earth-mass planets is expected to be within the reach of these ELTs.

In parallel, a new generation of instruments for current 8 to 10-m class facilities is being planned. These new cutting-edge suite of instruments include High-angular resolution AO imagers, micro-arcsec astrometry made with interferometers, and ultra stable spectrographs at a cm/s level. Synergies of these facilities with spaced-based observatories will play a key role in the discovery of earth-mass planets.

What are the requirements that this instrumentation have to match to allow us to find other Earths? Do we know how to calibrate the instruments to achieve such a precision and stability? Equally important are the limitations imposed by intrinsic astrophysical phenomena such as stellar activity, granulation, or oscillations. Are we preparing ourselves to deal and to correct for these effects? Which are the ultimate limitations for the different techniques mounted on ground- or space-based facilities?

We therefore want to gather the community of planetary astronomers and instrumentalists working on the field to:

Our conference will give particular emphasis to the contribution from the upcoming generation of extremely large telescopes (ELTs) to this task of finding and characterizing other Earths.

Scientific Organizing Committee

Local Organizing Committee
N. Santos (Chair), S. Sousa, E. Silva

Organizers
Nuno C. Santos (CAUP), C.  Melo, L. Pasquini, A. Glindemann (ESO)


ESO Centro de Astrofísica da U.Porto