Principal Investigator Hilke Schlichting
With the number of known exoplanets climbing into the thousands, exoplanet research is at a truly exciting time. And although current sensitivity limits are such that true Solar system analogs remain challenging to detect, numerous exoplanets have been discovered that are very different from our own Solar system. The majority of systems known to date harbor a new class of planets, bodies that are typically several times more massive than the Earth but that orbit their host stars well inside the orbit of Mercury. Our work focuses on where and how this new class of planets formed.
Examples of recent research carried out with my group and collaborators include work examining the amount of material needed to form the close-in Exoplanet systems, calculating self-consistently how much gas these planets accreted as envelopes and retained since their formation (Ginzburg, Schlichting & Sari 2016), and suggesting that the large diversity displayed in exoplanet mean densities is due to giant impacts that can strip a significant fraction of the gaseous atmospheres (Inamdar & Schlichting 2016).