Ji Wang (Yale) - Advancing Our Knowledge of Planets In the Habitable Zone and Beyond

I will dedicate the first half of the talk to the Planet Hunters project and the highlights over 3 years. Planet Hunters have a unique advantage of finding transiting signals in complicated light curves and with long intervals. These discoveries have significant implications to our understanding of the planet in the habitable zone and beyond. In the second half of my talk, I will discuss how the Kepler data help to reveal two fundamental aspects of planet formation: 1), a universal planet-metallicity correlation; and 2), a suppressive influence of a close-in stellar companion on planet formation in multiple stellar systems.