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 …
AbSciCon 2026 will be held in Madison, Wisconsin in May 2026, and the community is invited to contribute to Session 39: Dynamical Environments of Habitable Worlds, led by Joseph Livesey. Session Description: Over a hundred exoplanets have been detected that orbit within the classical habitable zone. This definition of habitability accounts only for the equilibrium …
The Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium has released its list of Fall Award recipients, and three members of the ExoDyn research team have been recognized. Graduate students Joseph Livesey and Eshan Raul, along with undergraduate researcher Eva Stafne, earned awards. Congratulations to all the awardees! Read more about the Fall WSGC awardees. .
In a his new first-author paper (now on arXiv), UW–Madison undergraduate alumni Devansh Mathur investigates what happens to small planetary embryos interior to a forming hot Jupiter. Using hundreds of N-body simulations, he showed that if enough solid material is pushed inward during short-range migration, both the giant planet and smaller interior companion planets could …
A new paper led by UW-Madison undergraduate Eva Stafne and published in ApJ this week (arXiv preprint here) explores how general relativity (the same physics that explains Mercury’s orbit) could help preserve life-friendly conditions on planets orbiting white dwarfs. White dwarfs are the dense stellar remnants of Sun-like stars. Their habitable zones lie extremely close, …
Hycean planets (ocean worlds with H-rich atmospheres) are thought to be promising spots for life, particularly around M-dwarfs, with the habitable zone being much wider than it is for terrestrial planets. But there’s a twist… In a new paper accepted to ApJ Letters and on arXiv now, UW-Madison graduate student Joseph Livesey shows that tidal heating from …