To support Research Managers and Project Leaders, the British Council is working with UKRI to offer a one hour webinar around incorporating gender considerations into international research proposals. The webinar has come about as funders have found that this is an area which is not addressed correctly, resulting in projects not being funded.

Since the discovery of the first planet orbiting a distant star 30 years ago, more than 7000 exoplanets have been found. They showcase a very diverse planet population with properties and system architectures greatly different from the Solar System. While we are still waiting to discover the first true Earth analogue, we have made big leaps in characterising the known planets in terms of the composition and atmospheres. At the forefront of these characterisation efforts is the CHEOPS space mission, a 30-cm space telescope optimised to perform ultra-high precision stellar brightness measurements that allow us to characterise exoplanets via “transits”, passages of the planets in front of their host stars. CHEOPS has the capacity to characterise small planets transiting Solar-type stars and also probes planetary atmospheres through measurements of the planetary day side flux encoded in secondary eclipses. In this talk, I will present science highlights of the CHEOPS mission and also discuss them in context with results from other facilities, notably the James Webb Space Telescope and the ground-based 8-m Very Large Telescope. I will conclude with a view on the future of exoplanet detection with PLATO, an ambitious space mission promising to detect the first bona-fide Earth analogue.

Additional information: bit.ly/physics-colloquium-lendl-2025 <http://bit.ly/physics-colloquium-lendl-2025>.