Katherine Deck (Caltech) The dynamics of evolving planetary systems

Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, spanning orders of magnitude in planet mass and orbital separation from their host stars, with orbits both excited and dynamically cold. Additionally, a large fraction of this diverse group are part of multi-planet systems. These observations largely represent the planet population at a single stage in their lifetimes; to use them to constrain the planet formation & evolution process requires an understanding of how planetary systems evolve in time. In this talk I will discuss how dynamical processes like orbital instability & interaction with a protoplanetary disk can shape planetary systems. I will also show how the dynamical evolution of orbits on short-timescales can be used to characterize transiting multi-planet systems.