Galaxies and Cosmology Seminar

Toward a Galactic Exoplanet Census

The discovery of thousands of exoplanets over the past 30 years affords us the opportunity to form and statistically test theories of planet formation across a wide range of conditions, but key gaps remain in the galactic exoplanet census. I will first present results from the TESS Grand Unified Hot Jupiter Survey, a major effort I led to achieve an order-of-magnitude advance in our demographic understanding of hot Jupiters. The next frontier in exoplanet demographics is to push beyond the solar neighborhood to understand how galactic environment shapes planet formation. I will discuss my group's work using giant planets as the first beacons of planetary systems in the galactic thick disk and beyond, ahead of near-future missions like Roman and PLATO which will reveal smaller planets in these galactic populations. Finally, I will discuss how these large-scale surveys enable the discovery of key benchmark systems that serve as laboratories for key physical processes like tidal inflation and orbital decay.