Formation inversion

Inferring planet formation from atmospheric composition is a long-desired objective of the exoplanet community. In our work we study which atmospheric tracers (C/O, N/O, refractories, isotopes) may be used to best achieve this goal. This includes identifying those formation processes that make a formation inversion difficult, and determining approaches towards the problem that are actually informative.

Fitting the inferred atmospheric composition of HR 8799e with various formation models, taken from Mollière et al. (2022).