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OATS-DAUT SEMINAR
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Speaker: Francesco Marzari (Università di Padova)

Title: Dynamics of Extrasolar Planets

Date: Wednesday, April 4th, 2007
Time: 12:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni

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Abstract: More than a hundred extrasolar planets have been uncovered so far around close stars. This new population of planetes have new striking dynamical features not observed in our solar system. The existence of a large subset of extrasolar gaseous planets orbiting very close to their parent star (hot Jupiters) has suggested the possibility that they migrated large distances inwards from their formation sites where the mass density was high enough to allow runaway accretion of planetesimals and gas infall. I will discuss the origin and implications of the migration mechanisms proposed so far. The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is also unusual being peaked towards eccentricity significantly larger compared to those of our solar system. I will present some dynamical mechanism that can lead to eccentric orbits including Kozai resonances and gravitational scattering of multiplanet systems.
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