We presently now know more than 7,000 exoplanets, and the pace of discoveries is accelerating due to the development and deployment of new instruments both on the ground and in space. The discovery of thousands of exoplanets has raised several fundamental questions and given rise to a whole new field of astrophysics. Many discoveries still challenge models, prompting astronomers to rethink how planets form and evolve. As we improve the detection techniques, the mass of the observed planets is decreasing, and a major goal will be the detection and characterization of habitable planets around Sun-like stars.
Formation models and statistics of currently detected exoplanets show that their numbers increase with low masses, as does the number of planets per system. At present, we know more than 1,000 multiplanetary systems, most with two or three planets, but also some with six or seven planets. Many of these systems are in compact orbits, prone to strong gravitational interactions. These systems are of great importance in exoplanet studies because they provide us with additional information about the system itself (constraints on the orbits, formation, and evolution). In addition, they are those that most resemble our solar system and are the best candidates for hosting planets like the Earth.
Detecting and characterizing planets in multiple systems is not an easy task, because the traces of each body overlap, and the observations can be reproduced by different orbital configurations. Additionally, in many systems, planets are involved in mean motion resonances or resonant chains, making it even more difficult to disentangle the individual contributions. Nonetheless, they also impose more constraints on their formation process.
Given the influx of new data and the onset of new projects and missions, it is essential to have reliable techniques for a systematic analysis of the data and confirmation of exoplanet candidates. It is also important to obtain analytical and numerical methods to understand the dynamics of multiplanetary systems, which can present atypical configurations. By studying the architectures of these systems, we can deduce the dynamical effects that produced them, which give constraints for the formation and evolution scenarios.
At this meeting, we aim to bring together communities of observers and theoreticians working on exoplanets. Through the exchange of knowledge and difficulties, we hope that it will be possible to develop common strategies to extract the maximum constraints from observational data and theoretical models. On the one hand, we expect observers to be able to better design, prepare, and schedule their observations for a given target and, on the other hand, we expect theoreticians to understand the instrumental limitations and thus construct their models to use the observed quantities as parameters.
The DDE meeting is a real opportunity to demonstrate the power of interdisciplinary collaboration after 30 years of studies on exoplanets. This is a unique opportunity to bring together astronomers from many disciplines. Multidisciplinary has attracted more communities and given rise to new scientific fields such as astrobiology. The common denominator will be the study of exoplanets, but with priority given to speakers on interdisciplinary subjects.
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