SO-IAA Colloquium: Unveiling the nature of planetary systems

The burgeoning field of exoplanets has yielded thousands of discoveries, which collectively have the potential to help us better understand our place in the Universe. Every month more and more planetary systems are being discovered,some of them in highly exotic configurations never observed previously. The combination of different techniques and studies are needed to unveil the real nature of these planetary systems. In this seminar, I will review some of the most recent photometric surveys notably dedicated to find Earth-size planets, such as TESS and SPECULOOS, and how the combination of their findings with ground-based spectroscopic surveys, such as CARMENES, can be used to discriminate between families of planets: rocky super-Earths, volatile-rich super-Earths, Neptunes etc. I will also show how dynamical simulations help to better understand the planetary architecture of each system discovered by the aforementioned methods. Indeed, as it happens with studies of our own Solar System, to yield a deeper understanding of planetary architectures, both in general and specific cases,we need to study each system as a whole by taking into consideration the star, the planets, and the minor bodies within the system (dust disks, main asteroid analogues, etc.). I will show how the combination of all these methods (photometry,spectroscopy, and dynamical simulations) is necessary to shed light onto the real nature of a given planetary system.

Date: 
10/12/2019 - 12:30
Speaker: 
Dr. Francisco Pozuelos
Filiation: 
University of Liège - Belgium


Seminars