Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Besides discovering thousands of planetary systems orbiting other stars, one of the legacies of NASA's Kepler mission is the discovery of new planetary architectures. Systems of up to seven planets have been found with orbital periods near integer ratios, librating in three-body resonances. These features point to disk migration into their current orbits and a history of tidal dissipation in the planets over the lifetime of the star. Separately, gas giant planets have been found in orbit around binary star systems, at a location just barely stable against dynamical ejection. Such a location would have been hostile to formation, whereas disk migration models readily explain them. With further study, these two new architectures will help us validate the physics of planet-disk interactions.