The science of extra-solar planets is one of the most rapidly changing areas of astrophysics and since 1995 the number of planets known has increased by almost two orders of magnitude. A combination of ground-based surveys and dedicated space missions has resulted in 560-plus planets being detected, and over 1200 that await confirmation. NASA's Kepler mission has opened up the possibility of discovering Earth-like planets in the habitable zone around some of the 100,000 stars it is surveying during its 3 to 4-year lifetime. The new ESA's Gaia mission is expected to discover thousands of new planets around stars within 200 parsecs of the Sun. The key challenge now is moving on from discovery, important though that remains, to characterisation: what are these planets actually like, and why are they as they are?

In the past ten years, we have learned how to obtain the first spectra of exoplanets using transit transmission and emission spectroscopy. With the high stability of Spitzer, Hubble, and large ground-based telescopes the spectra of bright close-in massive planets can be obtained and species like water vapour, methane, carbon monoxide and dioxide have been detected. With transit science came the first tangible remote sensing of these planetary bodies and so one can start to extrapolate from what has been learnt from Solar System probes to what one might plan to learn about their faraway siblings. As we learn more about the atmospheres, surfaces and near-surfaces of these remote bodies, we will begin to build up a clearer picture of their construction, history and suitability for life.

The Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory, EChO, will be the first dedicated mission to investigate the physics and chemistry of Exoplanetary Atmospheres. By characterising spectroscopically more bodies in different environments we will take detailed planetology out of the Solar System and into the Galaxy as a whole.

EChO has now been selected by the European Space Agency to be assessed as one of four M3 mission candidates.

Searches for extrasolar planets using the periodic Doppler shift of stellar spectral lines have recently achieved a precision better than 60cm/s. To find a 1-Earth mass planet in an Earth-like orbit, a precision of 5cm/s is necessary. The combination of a laser frequency comb with a Fabry-Perot filtering cavity has been suggested as a promising approach to achieve such Doppler shift resolution via improved spectrograph wavelength calibration. Here we report the fabrication of such a filtered laser comb with up to 40 GHz (~1 Angstrom) line spacing, generated from a 1 GHz repetition-rate source, without compromising long-term stability, reproducibility or spectral resolution. This wide-line-spacing comb (astro-comb) is well matched to the resolving power of high-resolution astrophysical spectrographs. The astrocomb should allow a precision as high as 1cm/s in astronomical readial velocity measurements.

The Canadian MOST satellite is a unique platform for observations of bright transiting exoplanetary systems. Providing nearly continuous photometric observations for up to 4 weeks, MOST can produce important observational data to help us learn about the properties of exosolar planets. We review our current observations of HD 209458 and HD 189733 with implications for the albedo and our progress towards detecting reflected light from an exoplanet.

Extrasolar super-Earths (1-10 M⊕) are likely to exist with a wide range of atmospheres. While a number of these planets have already been discovered through radial velocities and microlensing, it will be the discovery of the first transiting super-Earths that will open the door to a variety of follow-up observations aimed at characterizing their atmospheres. Super-Earths may fill a large range of parameter space in terms of their atmospheric composition and mass. Specifically, some of these planets may have high enough surface gravities to be able to retain large hydrogen-rich atmosphseres, while others will have lost most of their hydrogen to space over the planet's lifetime, leaving behind an atmosphere more closely resembling that of Earth or Venus. The resulting composition of the super-Earth atmosphere will therefore depend strongly on factors such as atmospheric escape history, outgassing history, and the level of stellar irradiation that it receives. Here we present theoretical models of super-Earth emission and transmission spectra for a variety of possible outcomes of super-Earth atmospheric composition ranging from hydrogen-rich to hydrogen-poor. We focus on how observations can be used to differentiate between the various scenarios and constrain atmospheric composition.

The meeting started at 16h00. The president welcomed the 24 participants to the business meeting of Commission 27. After the approval of the agenda, she gave an overview of the activities of Commission 27 of the past three years.

Polaris, the nearest and brightest classical Cepheid, is a member of at least a triple system. It has a wide (18″) physical companion, the F-type dwarf Polaris B. Polaris itself is a single-lined spectroscopic binary with an orbital period of ∼30 years (Kamper 1996). By combining Hipparcos measurements of the instantaneous proper motion with long-term measurements and the Kamper radial-velocity orbit, Wielen et al (2000) have predicted the astrometric orbit of the close companion. Using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Advanced Camera for Surveys' High-Resolution Channel with an ultraviolet (F220W) filter, we have now directly detected the close companion. Based on the Wielen et al orbit, the Hipparcos parallax, and our measurement of the separation (0″.176 ± 0″.002), we find a preliminary mass of 5.0 ± 1.5 M⊙ for the Cepheid and 1.38 ± 0.61 M⊙ for the close companion. These values will be refined by additional HST observations scheduled for the next 3 years.

We have also obtained a Chandra ACIS-I image of the Polaris field. Two distant companions C and D are not X-rays sources and hence are not young enough to be physical companions of the Cepheid. There is one additional stellar X-ray source in the field, located 253″ from Polaris A, which is a possible companion. Further investigation of such a distant companion is valuable to confirm the full extent of the system.

We report the major highlights of variable star research within the past three years. This overview is limited to intrinsically variable stars, because the achievements in variable star research stemming from binarity, or multiplicity in general, is covered by the summary report of Commissions 26 and 42.

We investigate the influence of blending on the Cepheid distance scale using two Local Group galaxies, M31 and M33. Blending leads to systematically low distances to galaxies observed with the HST, and therefore to systematically high estimates of H0. High-resolution HST images are compared to our ground-based data, obtained as part of the DIRECT project, for a sample of 22 Cepheids in M31 and 102 Cepheids in M33. For a sample of 22 Cepheids in M31, the average (median) flux contribution from luminous companions not resolved on the ground-based images in the V-band, SV, is about 19% (12%) of the flux of the Cepheid. For 102 Cepheids in M33 the average (median) values of SV, SI, SB are 23% (13%), 28% (20%), 28% (15%). For 64 Cepheids in M33 with periods in excess of 10 days the average (median) SV, SI, SB are 16% (7%), 23% (12%), 20% (10%).

We present preliminary results from a synoptic photometric variability survey of the galactic globular cluster M3. These data consist of between 9 and 13 nights of data, the sampling allows a minimum detectable period of 10 minutes and is complete to MV ~ 21.

The two nearby galaxies, M31 and M33, are stepping stones for most of our current efforts to understand the evolving universe at large scales. We are undertaking a long term project, called DIRECT, to improve the direct distance estimate to M31 and M33. The massive photometry we have obtained as part of our project over the past 3 years provides us with very good light curves for known and new Cepheid variables, a large number of eclipsing binaries and other variable stars.

We review the basic concepts, present state of theoretical models, and the future prospects for theory and observations of pulsating stellar atmospheres. Our emphasis is on radially pulsating cool stars, which dynamic atmospheres provide a general example for the differences with standard static model atmospheres.

The problem of deriving the centre-of-mass velocity of a radially pulsating star is reexamined. New observations of line asymmetry and Non-LTE radiation hydrodynamics point to a systematic effect of about 1 km s−1 in Cepheids.

Luminous low-mass stars of intermediate Teff – candidates for post-AGB transition objects to PNNi, are all expected to be pulsationally variable. Different modes and their combinations may be involved, leading to a variety of observed behaviour.