Marshall Johnson
Constraining Planet Formation and Migration with Exoplanet Statistics
February 7, 2019
When: February 7, 2019 3:30PM
Marshall Johnson
The Ohio State University
Over the last decade the field of exoplanetary science has made great strides, thanks in large part to the Kepler mission, as well as ground-based surveys for transiting planets. The large number of planets that we have detected and characterized have enabled statistical investigations of the properties of planetary populations, which offer insight into planet formation and migration processes. One key parameter is the alignment (or lack thereof) between the planetary orbit and the stellar rotation, which is a tracer of planets’ dynamical and migration histories. I will discuss how we measure these alignments, and present my recent results on the implications for hot Jupiter migration. Another fruitful avenue is to expand the parameter space over which we have discovered and characterized planets. I will present my ongoing work to measure the planet occurrence rate for A stars, and to characterize longer-period planets around all stars. Finally, I will highlight the contributions that LCO can make on these fronts in the TESS era.