Résumé / Abstract Seminaire_IAP
« Emergence of four types of planetary system architectures and link to the radius valley »

Christoph Mordasini (Universität Bern Physikalisches Institut, Suisse)

The observational progress on extrasolar planet statistics has brought us in the past 27 year a wealth of demographical constraints for planet formation and evolution theory. An approach to exploit these constraints theoretically is planetary population synthesis, where synthetic populations are generated using a complex end-to-end model of planet formation and evolution. By combining a multitude of physical processes in one large model (like disk evolution, gas and solid accretion, orbital migration, N-body interactions etc.), such global models directly predict observable statistical properties of synthetic planetary systems given disk initial conditions. A downside of the approach is, however, the complexity in analysing and interpreting the numerical results because of the non-linear interactions of all the physical processes included. In this talk, I will present results of large-scale population synthesis simulations based on classical concepts that predict the emergence of four different classes of planetary system architectures. Despite the many physical processes included in the numerical model, these fundamental outcomes can be understood via a number of mass scales that can be derived analytically, for example by comparing governing timescales. In the following, these theoretical findings will be compared with various observational constraints. Finally, a link is make to the so-called radius valley (also known as the Fulton gap), which is an observed dearth of extrasolar planets with a radius of about 1.7 Earth radii, separating smaller super-Earths from larger sub-Neptunes.
vendredi 27 janvier 2023 - 11:00
Amphithéâtre Henri Mineur, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
Page web du séminaire / Seminar's webpage