Gravity seminar: Hot Jupiter formation in dense cluster, Yi-Han Wang, Stony Brook University

The discovery of hot Jupiters,  massive planets with very short periods
(few days) not only initiated a revolution in planetary formation
science, but also opened up the field of exoplanet discovery and
characterization to include systems not observed in our own Solar
System. Because they are among the easiest extrasolar planets to
observe, hot Jupiters have been rapidly discovered in the past decade,
and they now play a major role in the field of exoplanets. Their close
proximity to the host stars, not expected in standard planetary
formation theory,  has inspired extensive theoretical work, thereby
broadening our understanding of planetary system formation and
evolution. Recent discoveries have revealed that the hot Jupiters
correlate with star clustering, suggesting that stellar interactions in
dense environments may play a role in their formation. In this talk, I
will present the results of few-body scattering experiments and
long-term integration via our state of art N-body code SpaceHub. We find
that stellar flybys play an essential role in hot Jupiter formation in
star clusters.