Planetary systems around other stars are much more diverse than originally predicted by theories than can explain our own Solar System. We explore the origin of this diversity and how initial conditions in protoplanetary disks impact final planetary architectures.
Ongoing Projects:
- Unveiling the primordial short-period planet population. To reach this goal we are carrying out a homogeneous search for planets in young clusters using TESS FFI. This project is particularly important to properly assess the frequency of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone (see Pascucci et al. 2019).
- The Planetary Systems in the Solar Neighborhood. This NASA-funded project will use the Kepler statistics from distant planetary systems and our Exoplanet Population Observation Simulator (EPOS, Mulders et al. 2018) to statistically assess which nearby stars are more likely to host an exo-Earth.
Past main results:
- Exoplanets frequency – snowline. The giant planet occurrence rate peaks at~2-3au (Fernandes et al. 2019), close to the location of the snowline. The most common planet inside the snowline is three to ten times less massive than the one outside (Pascucci et al. 2018).
- Stellar-mass-dependencies in exoplanets and disks. The dust disk mass scales steeply with stellar mass while the average solid mass locked in exoplanets within 1 au scales inversely with stellar mass (Mulders, Pascucci, Apai 2015b, Pascucci et al. 2016). The steep drop in exoplanets at 10 days is likely a signature of the gas truncation radius (Mulders, Pascucci, Apai 2015a).
- Planet occurrence rates and stellar metallicities (Mulders et al. 2016). We used Kepler and LAMOST to show that: i) exoplanets with orbital periods less than 10 days are preferentially found around metal-rich stars, regardless of the planet radius and ii) more small planets at large orbital periods are hosted around metal-poor stars.