The formation and evolution of planetary systems are critical links in understanding how we came to be. With an eye on exoplanet demography, my talk outlines two observational approaches for studying planet formation and evolution. In the first approach, I focus on the aftermath of planet formation by estimating the occurrence rate of hot jupiters with an inner companion planet through a systematic search of TESS, Kepler, and K2 light curves. These systems appear to be intrinsically rare, and quantifying this scarcity helps constrain the fraction of hot jupiters that formed through disk migration or in situ as opposed to under high-eccentricity migration, since the inner companion is not expected to survive under the latter mechanism. My search reveals the TOI-2000 system, which consists of a mini-neptune and a hot saturn with respective 3- and 9-day periods, both of which are superb candidates for comparative atmospheric characterization by the JWST. The second approach is to study young exoplanet systems found shortly after the protoplanetary disk dissipates and planet formation concludes. By comparing them to more mature systems, we can test hypotheses of their dynamical evolution through measuring the sky-projected stellar spin–planet orbit angle, or stellar obliquity. However, fewer than ten planets younger than 100 Myr have measured stellar obliquity, and even then most of them have poorly constrained ages. I will discuss my pilot efforts expanding the number of young star candidates to search for planets using TESS photometric rotation periods in the 100 Myr open cluster Blanco 1.
Host: Sharon Wang
