Princeton University Special Seminar

Exoplanet discoveries over the past three decades have revealed an astonishing diversity of planetary systems. As we have uncovered an abundance of systems quite unlike our own, gravitational dynamics theory has allowed us to not only measure planet masses and orbits but also interpret what these measurements tell us about how these systems form and evolve. While this has led to significant strides in understanding the population of close-in planets that have dominated survey discoveries up until now, we do not have a firm grasp of what other systems look like at wider separations, where our own solar system planets reside. This will change in the near future when NASA’s Roman mission provides our first glimpse of the low-mass planet population beyond ~1 AU. In this talk, I will describe how gravitational dynamics theory will provide essential insights for interpreting Roman’s micro-lensing planet detections. In particular, this theory will link together the population statistics of bound and free-floating planets to give a comprehensive picture of how orbital evolution shapes the outer regions of planetary systems. This will allow us to place our own solar system in context, especially as Rubin LSST’s upcoming census of solar system small bodies offers a complementary opportunity to study the past orbital evolution of our own outer planets in unprecedented detail.