Image Source.

Back from a great visit to the Harvard CfA. The exoplanet research effort out there is amazingly comprehensive, and I soaked up a whole range of interesting news items to report. A slew of posts are in the works.

I’ve uploaded my colloquium talk in (1) Apple Keynote format (harvard.key.tar.gz) , (2) Powerpoint format (harvard.ppt.tar.gz), and (3) as a set of .pdfs. The talk was built in Keynote, and thus will look best in that format. Note that the Keynote and Powerpoint files are both quite large (~58MB compressed, ~90MB uncompressed) because they contain a variety of animations. The .pdfs amount to about 7 MB, and show only the splash frames from the animations. Feel free to use any of these slides in presentations or classes (with a shout-out to oklo.org).

Eugenio has been working hard on the console during the past few days. The downloadable version now contains a stability checker which integrates a fit for a user-specified period. Relative changes in the semi-major axes of more than 1% are then used to flag instability. Give it a whirl! We’ll discuss it in more detail in an upcoming post.

Tomorrow, I’ll announce the results of the second systemic challenge. The third challenge system is already available on the downloadable console.