Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

The new era of exoplanetary discovery has begun to allow a statistical understanding of planetary distributions to inform our knowledge of planet formation and migration. These data now allow us to start inferring the relative importance of various dynamical processes. I will discuss a few features of these emerging statistical distributions, and possible mechanisms to produce such features, focussing particularly on disk-planet interactions. I will discuss how wave resonance may affect the distribution of close-in planets, as well as how the "Eccentricity Valley" in the exoplanet distribution around metal-poor stars may be a signature of an eccentricity excitation process related to stellar insolation of giant planets.