Departmental Colloquium
- Title
- A Song of Ice and Fire --- Dynamics of Planets Hot and Cold
- Guest Speaker
- Professor Gongjie Li
- Guest Affiliation
- Department of Physics, Georgia Tech
- When
- Thursday, January 10, 2019 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
- Location
- Physics Auditorium (202)
- Details
-
The unexpected diversity of planetary systems has posed challenges to our classical understanding of planetary formation. For instance, Jupiter sized planets have been detected with short orbital periods of a few days, misaligned with respect to the spin- axis of their host stars. I will first describe the dynamical interactions between an outer perturber and the inner planet, which naturally leads to the formation of such misaligned hot Jupiters. Next, I will discuss a similar dynamical process in the outer Solar System, far away from our Sun, which causes the observed clustering of extreme trans-Neptunian objects. This can constrain properties of a possible outer planet, Planet Nine, in our own Solar System.