Hot Jupiters: Lands of Plenty

In late August 2005, 80 researchers from more than 15 countries convened for a 4-day conference entitled “The Tenth Anniversary of 51 Peg b: Status and Prospects for Hot Jupiter Studies”. The meeting was held at l’Observatoire de Haute-Provence, the location of the 1.93-m telescope and ELODIE spectrograph used to discover the planetary companion to 51 Peg roughly 10 years ago. I summarize several dominant themes that emerged from the meeting, including (i) recent improvements in the precision of radial velocity measurements of nearby, Sun-like stars, (ii) the continued value of individual, newly-discovered planets of novel character to expand the parameter space with which the theory must contend, and (iii) the crucial role of space-based observatories in efforts to characterize hot Jupiter planets. I also present the returns of an informal poll of the conference attendees conducted on the last day of the meeting, which may be amusing to revisit a decade hence. 1. Dominant Themes from the Meeting Prior to the October 1995 announcement of the discovery of the planetary companion to 51 Peg (Mayor & Queloz 1995), few astronomers foresaw the existence of hot Jupiter exoplanets (for a notable exception, see Struve 1952). In the past decade, this subclass of exoplanets has been by far the best observationally studied, due to the rich set of followup techniques enabled by the proximity of the planet to the host star. The entire volume of this conference proceedings is replete with descriptions of dozens of exciting studies, some in progress, others planned for the near-future, detailing a wide diversity of observational efforts too numerous to list here. Radial velocity observations remain the dom-