Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Observations of exoplanets over the past quarter century have shown that the demographics and architectures of planetary systems display a remarkable diversity spanning over four orders of magnitude in mass, separation, and age. Direct imaging has opened up much of this landscape, enabling a powerful probe of the orbits, atmospheres, and origin of long-period giant planets. Large dedicated surveys in particular are constraining the frequency and mass-period distribution functions of this population with progressively improved precision, providing a window into the efficiency of planet formation and migration at large orbital distances. In this talk I will review recent progress aimed at understanding the occurrence rate, circumplanetary disks, dynamical masses, angular momentum architecture, and subtler statistical properties of directly imaged exoplanets. Together these results are beginning to clarify the dominant formation pathway of these companions and their relationship to planets at smaller separations.