ICTS

The discovery of extrasolar planets enables us to tackle millennia old questions about whether the Earth and our Solar System are unique, and how they formed, and whether Life exists beyond the Earth. The 6000 exoplanets now known reveal many of the underlying mechanisms of how planets form and evolve, and the complex interplay between stars and the planets over time in sculpting the atmospheres of planets and the architecture of planetary systems.

In this talk I will discuss the techniques we use to discover exoplanets, the challenges of detecting terrestrial planets like the Earth, capable of hosting liquid water on their surface, and how the coolest most numerous stars in the Galaxy are potentially attractive targets. New precision spectroscopic and photometric instruments are now beginning to discover and characterize rocky planets around the coolest stars, and discovering ways to mitigate the noise from the stars themselves, that currently limits our ability to discover planets like our own around the nearest Sun-like stars.

The talk will also discuss how these discoveries pave the way for NASA's next flagship mission - the Habitable World Observatory, which will be capable of observing these new worlds in reflected light, and analyzing this light to search for biosignatures in their atmosphere. The ability to answer the age-old question of whether Life exists outside the solar system is now within our reach!

In this pedagogical lecture I will review the main discovery techniques for exoplanets, and their relative strengths and weaknesses. The goal will be to understand what parameter space each discovery technique shines in, and how combinations of some of these techniques can further increase our understanding of exoplanet properties.

The observation of the first hot Jupiters around 3 decades ago has fuel the field of planet formation as the origin of these planets is still unknown at the present day. As such, planet formation models face the challenge to bridge two distinct states within the timeframe of the observations of planetary systems: the protoplanetary disc stage during which the planets form and the final (exo)-planetary system. This implies that models of planet formation need to include the structure and evolution of the protoplanetary discs, the accretion and migration processes of the growing planets as well as their composition. Consequently many different initial parameters of the disc (e.g. disc mass, disc radius, viscosity) and the planet (e.g. starting position and time) can be chosen. However, the number of observational constraints (e.g. planetary mass, final orbital distance) is limited, giving rise to a degeneracy within the models. A promising avenue to extend these observational constraints are measurements of atmospheric abundances, where observations via the JWST provide unprecedented data. In this talk, I will introduce the ingredients of planet formation models and how we can link these models to constraints from exoplanetary atmospheres to reveal the formation location of (hot) giant planets.

All magnetized solar system planets are strong radio emitters. Similar radio emissions have been found in the lowest mass stars and brown dwarfs and searches for radio emission from exoplanets is underway. These emissions are thought to be powered by various mechanisms drawing energy from the rotation of the emitting object, magnetic reconnection and/or magnetized wind impinging on the object. In this talk I will review the fundamentals of the relevant emission mechanisms, the plasma conditions that lead to such emissions, phenomenology of the observed emission and open questions in the field.

We analyze the transit timing variations (TTVs) of the hot Jupiter WASP-12b using 391 transit light curves, including seven new ground-based observations and data from TESS, ETD, ExoClock, and the literature. All light curves were uniformly modeled to obtain precise mid-transit times. The timing analysis reveals a significant orbital decay rate of −30.31 ms yr⁻¹, corresponding to a stellar tidal quality factor of Q′⋆ = 1.61 × 10⁵. Model selection criteria (χ²ᵣ, BIC, AIC) strongly favor orbital decay as the origin of the observed TTVs. However, a non-zero eccentricity allows apsidal precession as a viable alternative. We also derive a planetary Love number of kₚ = 0.66 ± 0.28, consistent with Jupiter’s value. While orbital decay is strongly supported, continued high-precision monitoring is required to fully constrain the system’s orbital evolution.

While stellar metallicity is a known predictor of giant planet occurrence, the specific influence of individual elemental groups on planetary orbital architecture remains less understood. This work explores how $\alpha$ and iron-peak elements influence giant planet formation and migration using the Hypatia Catalog. We discover using multiple statistical tests that core accretion is accelerated by "Primary Migration Drivers" (Fe, Ca, Si, Cr, Ti) and Oxygen, which causes rapid inward migration into the Hot Jupiter regime. On the other hand, gaseous volatiles like carbon have little statistical effect, whereas "Continuous Gradient Builders" (Mn, Ni, Mg) promote gradual planet expansion without causing abrupt population divisions. We find no evidence that the nucleosynthetic origin ($\alpha$ vs. iron-peak) of a planet's building blocks influences its formation pathway; instead, the influence of these species is controlled by their solid-phase availability and condensation temperatures. By demonstrating that stellar chemistry regulates the speed of core accretion, this work provides observational evidence that elemental abundances act as a fundamental clock for the orbital evolution of giant planets.