Abstract

Over the past two decades thousands of planets with an extraordinary diversity of properties have been discovered orbiting nearby stars.  Many of these exoplanetary systems challenge our narrative for how planets form and evolve, motivating the search for observational clues to the underlying mechanisms that led to this diversity.  In this talk I will describe my work using a wide range of observational techniques to uncover these underlying mechanisms.  I will constrain the physics of gas giant formation and evolution by discerning population statistics, system architectures, rotation rates, and atmospheric compositions of gas giant planets.  I will then discuss the effect that outer gas giants have on the inner architectures of planetary systems by exploring differences in inner planet masses, separations, multiplicities, and orbital properties.  Finally, I will highlight the key role that next generation instruments and telescopes such as the GMT will play by extending these novel observations to entirely new classes of planets.