Speaker
Description
Few planetary systems form in isolation. With both internal and external processes sculpting their orbital architectures over time, quantifying the extent of dynamical processing planets undergo in their birth environments is essential for mapping their present-day demographics to their primordial populations. Hot Jupiters – giant planets with orbital periods under ten days – provide a particularly powerful probe of this processing, given their likely origin at wider separations. In this talk, I will investigate the role of environmental perturbations in triggering dynamical instabilities – leading to the formation of hot Jupiters or free-floating planets – in dense cluster environments. I will present an efficient hybrid approach for modelling the long-term secular and tidal evolution of planetary systems under the influence of stochastic perturbations from passing stars using a combination of analytic and numerical approaches. This framework is applied to the open cluster M67 where an excess of hot Jupiters relative to the Galactic field has been previously reported. Through different sets of initial conditions, I will explore the role of the stellar environment in shaping the observed planetary demographics and discuss how further modelling efforts, in conjunction with future missions such as PLATO, can shed light on the formation and evolution of planets in the Galactic context.