The underlying population of exoplanets around stars in the Kepler sample can be inferred by a simulation that includes binning the Kepler planets in radius and period, invoking an empirical noise model, assuming a model exoplanet distribution function, randomly assigning planets to each of the Kepler target stars, asking whether each planet's transit signal could be detected by Kepler, binning the resulting simulated detections, comparing the simulations with the observed data sample, and iterating on the model parameters until a satisfactory fit is obtained. The process is designed to simulate the Kepler observing procedure. The key assumption is that the distribution function is the product of separable functions of period and radius. Any additional suspected biases in the sample can be handled by adjusting the noise model or selective editing of the range of input planets. An advantage of this overall procedure is that it is a forward calculation designed to simulate the observed data, subject to a presumed underlying population distribution, minimizing the effect of bin-to-bin fluctuations. Another advantage is that the resulting distribution function can be extended to values of period and radius that go beyond the sample space, including, for example, application to estimating eta-sub-Earth, and also estimating the expected science yields of future direct-imaging exoplanet missions such as WFIRST-AFTA.

The Kepler Mission has discovered thousands of planets with radii <4 R ⊕, paving the way for the first statistical studies of super-Earth dynamics, formation, and evolution. These calculations often require planetary masses, and yet the vast majority of Kepler planet candidates do not have theirs measured. A key concern is therefore how to map the measured radii to mass estimates in a size range that lacks Solar System analogs. While previous works have derived one-to-one relationships between radius and mass, a realistic mass-radius (M-R) relation should account for the range of compositions that we expect within the population. This compositional diversity creates astrophysical scatter in the relation, which we quantify here.

Gaia will have a revolutionary impact on most fields of astronomy. However, its scanning law is too sparse for traditional transit detection approaches (de Bruijne 2012). Practically, only stars brighter than 16th magnitude are relevant for follow-up of transiting exoplanets. For those stars, Gaia's precision is of the order of 1 mmag (Eyer et al. 2015). On average, Gaia will have sampled each target 70 times, but certain stars may be observed as many as 200 times (Voss et al. 2013). Hipparcos scanning law was similar, but its precision much worse. Nevertheless the transit of HD209458 could be seen, aposteriori, in Hipparcos' data (Söderhelm 1999). This inspired our GATE initiative.

The XXIX IAU General Assembly took place during the golden year of the exploration of small solar system bodies. With the Rosetta ESA mission around comet 67P, NASA Dawn and New Horizons missions nearby dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto, respectively, and the NASA/Cassini mission in Saturn neighborhood, year 2015 marked an important step towards further understanding of small solar system bodies. On August 11-13, Focus meeting 9 "Highlights in the exploration of small worlds" gathered scientists of all over the world to present and discuss the spectacular results obtained from these missions, as well as recent achievements obtained from past missions, comprehensive spectroscopic surveys from space (e.g., Herschel, NEOWISE, Gaia), ground-based observations, and geochemical analyses. This meeting was also the opportunity to discuss the state of our understanding of the nature of the various populations of small bodies in the Solar System, including icy satellites, in a cosmo-chemistry perspective.

For the last 3 decades, infrared and microwave techniques have enabled the detection of up to 27 parent molecules in the coma of comets. Several molecules have been detected in over 40 different comets. A large diversity of composition is seen in the sample, comprising comets of various dynamical origins. Abundances relative to water for the molecules can vary by a factor 3 to more than 10. The taxonomic study of a sample of comets in which the abundance of several molecules (e.g., HCN, CH3OH, CO, CH4, C2H6, H2S, H2CO, CH3CN, CS, . . .) has been measured does not show any clear grouping. Except for fragments of a common parent comet, every observed comet shows a different composition. The absence of any clear correlation between the volatile content of the comets and their dynamical origin (Kuiper Belt versus Oort Cloud) is consistent with a common origin for these two populations. Their diversity in composition may also suggest that radial and temporal mixing in the early proto-planetary nebula may have played an important role.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) was used to obtain measurements of spatially and spectrally resolved CH3OH emission from comet C/2012 K1 (PanSTARRS) on 28-29 June 2014. Detection of 12-14 emission lines of CH3OH on each day permitted the derivation of spatially-resolved rotational temperature profiles (averaged along the line of sight), for the innermost 5000 km of the coma. On each day, the CH3OH distribution was centrally peaked and approximately consistent with spherically symmetric, uniform outflow. The azimuthally-averaged CH3OH rotational temperature (Trot) as a function of sky-projected nucleocentric distance (ρ), fell by about 40 K between ρ= 0 and 2500 km on 28 June, whereas on 29 June, Trot fell by about 50 K between ρ =0 km and 1500 km. A remarkable (~50 K) rise in Trot at ρ = 1500-2500 km on 29 June was not present on 28 June. The observed variations in CH3OH rotational temperature are interpreted primarily as a result of variations in the coma kinetic temperature due to adiabatic cooling, and heating through Solar irradiation, but collisional and radiative non-LTE excitation processes also play a role.

The study of active asteroids has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years since the recognition of main-belt comets (which orbit in the main asteroid belt, but exhibit comet-like activity due to the sublimation of volatile ices) as a new class of comets in 2006, and the discovery of the first disrupted asteroids (which, unlike MBCs, exhibit comet-like activity due to a physical disruption such as an impact or rotational destabilization, not sublimation) in 2010. In this paper, I will briefly discuss key areas of interest in the study of active asteroids.

We update the list of candidates to be considered by the IAU as dwarf planets using the criterium suggested by Tancredi & Favre (2008). We add here the information collected in the last 10 years (mostly the sizes and albedos by the herschel hey program TNOs Are Cool). We compare the physical characteristics of these candidates with the physical characteristics of the rest of the TNOs. Our goal is to study if there are common physical properties among the candidates that enable the identification of a dwarf planet.

On February 15, 2013, 3:20 UT, an asteroid of the size of about 19 meters and mass of 12,000 metric tons entered the Earth's atmosphere unexpectedly near the border of Kazakhstan and Russia. It was the largest confirmed Earth impactor since the Tunguska event in 1908. The body moved approximately westwards with a speed of 19 km s−1, on a trajectory inclined 18 degrees to the surface, creating a fireball of steadily increasing brightness. Eleven seconds after the first sightings, the fireball reached its maximum brightness. At that point, it was located less than 40 km south from Chelyabinsk, a Russian city of population more than one million, at an altitude of 30 km. For people directly underneath, the fireball was 30 times brighter than the Sun. The cosmic body disrupted into fragments; the largest of them was visible for another five seconds before it disappeared at an altitude of 12.5 km, when it was decelerated to 3 km s−1. Fifty six second later, that ~600 kg fragment landed in Lake Chebarkul and created a 8 m wide hole in the ice. Small meteorites landed in an area 80 km long and several km wide and caused no damage. The meteorites were classified as LL ordinary chondrites and were interesting by the presence of two phases, light and dark. More material remained, however, in the atmosphere forming a dust trail up to 2 km wide and extending along the fireball trajectory from altitude 18 to 70 km. The dust then circled the Earth within few days and formed a ring around the northern hemisphere. In Chelyabinsk and its surroundings a very strong blast wave arrived 90 – 150 s after the fireball passage (depending on location). The wave was produced by the supersonic flight of the body and broke ~10% of windows in Chelyabinsk (~40% of buildings were affected). More than 1600 people were injured, mostly from broken glass. The whole event was well documented by video cameras, seismic and infrasonic records, and satellite observations. The total energy was 500 kT TNT (2 × 1015 J).

Comets are probably the best archives of the nascent solar system, 4.5 Gyr ago, and their compositions reveal crucial clues on the structure and dynamics of the early protoplanetary disk. Anhydrous minerals (olivine and pyroxene) have been identified in cometary dust for a few decades. Surprisingly, samples from comet Wild2 returned by the Stardust mission in 2006 also contain high temperature mineral assemblages like chondrules and refractory inclusions, which are typical components of primitive meteorites (carbonaceous chondrites - CCs). A few Stardust samples have also preserved some organic matter of comet Wild 2 that share some similarities with CCs. Interplanetary dust falling on Earth originate from comets and asteroids in proportions to be further constrained. These cosmic dust particles mostly show similarities with CCs, which in turn only represent a few percent of meteorites recovered on Earth. At least two (rare) families of cosmic dust particles have shown strong evidences for a cometary origin: the chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles (CP-IDPs) collected in the terrestrial stratosphere by NASA, and the ultracarbonaceous Antarctic Micrometeorites (UCAMMs) collected from polar snow and ice by French and Japanese teams. Analyses of dust particles from the Jupiter family comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the dust analyzers on Rosetta orbiter (COSIMA, GIADA, MIDAS) suggest a relationship to interplanetary dust/micrometeorites. A growing number of evidences highlights the existence of a continuum between asteroids and comets, already in the early history of the solar system.

Comets, asteroids, meteorites, micrometeorites, interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), and ultra-carbonaceous Antarctic micrometeorites (UCAMMs) may contain carbonaceous material, which was exogenously delivered to the early Earth. Carbonaceous chondrites have an enormous variety of extra-terrestrial compounds, including all the key compounds important in terrestrial biochemistry. Comets contain several carbon-rich species and, in addition, the hypervelocity impact-shock of a comet can produce several α-amino acids. The analysis of the carbonaceous content of extra-terrestrial matter provides a window into the resources delivered to the early Earth, which may have been used by the first living organisms.

The early Solar system produced a variety of bodies with different properties. Among the small bodies, objects that contain notable amounts of water ice are of particular interest. Water-rock separation on such worlds is probable and has been confirmed in some cases. We couple accretion and water-rock separation in a numerical model. The model is applicable to Ceres, icy satellites, and Kuiper belt objects, and is suited to assess the thermal metamorphism of the interior and the present-day internal structures. The relative amount of ice determines the differentiation regime according to porous flow or Stokes flow. Porous flow considers differentiation in a rock matrix with a small degree of ice melting and is typically modelled either with the Darcy law or two-phase flow. We find that for small icy bodies two-phase flow differs from the Darcy law. Velocities derived from two-phase flow are at least one order of magnitude smaller than Darcy velocities. The latter do not account for the matrix resistance against the deformation and overestimate the separation velocity. In the Stokes regime that should be used for large ice fractions, differentiation is at least four orders of magnitude faster than porous flow with the parameters used here.

Planets form in disks around young stars. In these disks, condensation fronts or snowlines of water, CO2, CO and other abundant molecules regulate the outcome of planet formation. Snowline locations determine how the elemental and molecular compositions of the gaseous and solid building blocks of planets evolve with distance from the central star. Snowlines may also locally increase the planet formation efficiency. Observations of snowlines have only become possible in the past couple of years. This proceeding reviews these observations as well as the theory on the physical and chemical processes in disks that affect snowline locations.

We briefly review what is currently known of 14N/15N ratios in interstellar molecules. We summarize the fractionation ratios measured in HCN, HNC, CN, N2 and NH3, and compare these to theoretical predictions and to the isotopic inventory of cometary volatiles.

From the transit expeditions of 1761 to JWST, ALMA, and the SKA, international projects have played an important role in driving astronomy and heliophysics. Over the past two decades, the increasing complexity and cost of new facilities, the constrained amount of funding available from individual sources, and the rapidly increasing volume of data produced by newer facilities have made international collaboration on large ground- and space-based facilities essential to moving the fields forward. As international cooperation becomes commonplace, data-sharing policies have become ever more important. All IAU members have a stake in the policy decisions made by nations and various scientific consortiums concerning data access and international collaborations. This focus meeting provided a forum to discuss how to improve coordination of global strategic planning in astronomy, astrophysics, and heliophysics in order to maximize the scientific return from research facilities.

Laboratory astrophysics is the Rosetta stone that enables astronomers to understand and interpret the cosmos. The IAU Commission 14, the predecessor of the new IAU Laboratory Astrophysics Commission C. B5 and the AAS Laboratory Astrophysics Division (LAD) decided to coordinate their efforts this summer to hold a joint meeting at the IAU General Assembly.

Stellar chemical composition analyses can only yield reliable abundances if the atomic transition parameters are accurately determined. During the last couple of decades a renewed emphasis on laboratory spectroscopy has produced large sets of useful atomic transition probabilities for species of interest to stellar spectroscopists. In many cases the transition data are of such high quality that they play little part in the abundance uncertainties. We summarize the current state of atomic parameters, highlighting the areas of satisfactory progress and noting places, where further laboratory progress will be welcome.

The Universe contains a broad range of plasmas with quite different properties depending on distinct physical processes. In this contribution we give an overview of recent developments in modeling such plasmas with a focus on X-ray emission and absorption. Despite the fact that such plasmas have been investigated already for decades, and that overall there is a good understanding of the basic processes, there are still areas, where improvements have to be made that are important for the analysis of astrophysical plasmas. We present recent work on the update of atomic parameters in the codes that describe the emission from collisional plasmas, where older approximations are being replaced now by more accurate data. Further we discuss the development of models for photo-ionised plasmas in the context of outflows around supermassive black holes and models for charge transfer that are needed for analyzing the data from the upcoming ASTRO-H satellite.

With the large improvement in effective area of Astro-H's micro-calorimeter soft X-ray spectrometer (SXS) over grating spectrometers, high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy with good signal to noise will become more commonly available, also for faint and extended sources. This will result in a range of spectral lines being resolved for the first time in celestial sources, especially in the Fe region. However, a large number of X-ray line energies in the atomic databases are known to a lesser accuracy than that expected for Astro-H/SXS, or have no known uncertainty at all. To benchmark the available calculations, we have therefore started to measure reference energies of K-shell transition in L-shell ions for astrophysically relevant elements in the range 11≤ Z ≤ 28 (Na to Ni), using the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's EBIT-I electron beam ion trap coupled with the NASA/GSFC EBIT calorimeter spectrometer (ECS). The ECS has a resolution of ~5 e V, i.e., similar to Astro-H/SXS and Chandra/HETG. A comparison to crystal spectra of lower charge states of sulfur with ~0.6 e V resolution shows that the analysis of spectra taken at ECS resolution allows to determine the transition energies of the strongest components.

OB-type stars present hotbeds for non-LTE physics because of their strong radiation fields that drive the atmospheric plasma out of local thermodynamic equilibrium. We report on recent breakthroughs in the quantitative analysis of the optical and UV-spectra of OB-type stars that were facilitated by application of accurate and precise atomic data on a large scale. An astrophysicist's dream has come true, by bringing observed and model spectra into close match over wide parts of the observed wavelength ranges. This allows tight observational constraints to be derived from OB-type stars for a wide range of applications in astrophysics. However, despite the progress made, many details of the modelling may be improved further. We discuss atomic data needs in terms of laboratory measurements and also ab-initio calculations. Particular emphasis is given to quantitative spectroscopy in the near-IR, which will be the focus in the era of the upcoming extremely large telescopes.