Piecing together the grand jigsaw of planet formation
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 …
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, …