The Prevalence of Distant Giant Companions to Inner Small Planets

Speaker: 
Judah van Zandt
Institution: 
University of California, Los Angeles
Date: 
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Time: 
3:45 pm
Location: 
NS2 1201

Abstract: I present a measurement of the conditional occurrence of distant giant planets in the presence of close-in small planets, demonstrating that such giants are slightly enhanced over the field rate when they have a small inner neighbor. In January of 2024 I completed the Distant Giants Survey, a 3-year radial velocity (RV) survey to estimate the conditional occurrence of long-period Jupiter analogs in systems hosting small transiting planets. Kepler taught us that small close-in planets occur at a rate of ~1 per Sun-like star. Meanwhile, ground-based RV surveys have shown that long-period gas giants are rarer, with an occurrence rate of ~0.15 per Sun-like star. By searching for giant planets in systems with known close-in small planets, I found that giant planets are more common (~0.3 per star) when a close-in small planet is present. This finding will help to refine exoplanet formation models and determine whether the solar system's architecture is a common outcome of exosystem evolution.

Host: 
Paul Robertson