Piecing together the grand jigsaw of planet formation
The end of the academic year is here, and we have two group members who are graduating: Hunter K. and Nathaniel Tanglin. Congratulations to both of you on this tremendous accomplishment! I would also like to congratulate several other group members on their recent accomplishments: Nadja Aldarondo Quiñones was awarded a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. …
A new paper recently published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific explores whether tightly packed planetary systems can host habitable worlds over billions of years. The paper, Dynamical Interactions and Habitability in the TOI-700 Multi-planet System, was led by Coleman Nelson, a 2025 undergraduate alumni of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The study …
My new paper, published in ApJ this month, tackles a question I always assumed the answer was “no” to in exoplanet dynamics: if a giant planet becomes a close-in hot/warm Jupiter via high-eccentricity tidal migration, can any short-period inner planets survive the chaos? What about ultra-short period companions? Using a mix of analytic estimates and …