Principal Investigator Hilke Schlichting
In addition to their composition, the orbital architecture of planetary systems also contains some important clues for understanding planet formation. When examining the resonance behavior of many of the Kepler planets we realized that most of them will, due to their small masses, undergo overstable librations, leading to escape from resonance. The resonance evolution in the presence of both disk migration and eccentricity damping for such planets is therefore fundamentally different from that of more massive gas giants. Overstable libations are likely the reason for the observed relative depletion of the 2:1 resonance compared to other first order resonance and may play a vital role in explaining the paucity of Kepler planets in resonance. Overstable librations likely also played a key role in the resonance evolution of satellites systems of Saturn and Jupiter.