Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

Planet Population Synthesis

Planet Population Synthesis is a statistical approach to study the conditions necessary for planet formation and evolution. We utilize the Bern model of planet formation and evolution (Alibert et al. 2013) within a population synthesis framework (Mordasini et al. 2009) to improve our understanding of key processes in planet formation, creating testable predictions in the process.

Members working on this project

Dr. Remo Burn

Postdoc

+49 6221 528-381

burn@...

Dr. Oliver Völkel

Former Position: Postdoc

+49 6221 528-105

voelkel@...

SPP 1992: Diversity of Exoplanets

Example spectrum for a well-studied exoplanet.

Example spectrum for a well-studied exoplanet.

Other Interesting Articles

Building a habitable earth

Over a period of 6 years, DFG is funding research projects within its SPP framework (DFG-Schwerpunktprogramm) "Building a Habitable Earth". The SPP will contribute to the still open question how Earth became the only known habitable planet.

Gravoturbulent planetesimal formation in the early solar system

Streaming instabilities are a result of sufficient dust densities and large relative flow velocities between dust and gas. This instability itself produces the turbulence that makes it possible to clump dust sufficiently together in order to become self-gravitating and thus overcome the meter-barrier in planet formation. This mechanism is thus of significant interest for the scientific community.

Planet-Disk-Interactions

A sufficiently massive planet will induce spiral arms, gap formation, migration and accretion shocks in his surrounding disk. We attempt to understand how all those processes backreact onto planetary formation and disk evolution.

Planets and their evolution

In order to link planetary population synthesis modells with observations, evolution calculations for single planets are needed. This is obvious as no planet is observed at an age of zero. We use atmospheric and structure modells planets, as well as atmospheric loss and bloating mechanisms for giant and rocky planets to develop our understanding of planetary populations.

Hydro-Dust-Interactions

The amplification or dampening of hydrodynamically instable features may be modified by the presence of dust. Also the dynamics of dust will surely follow pressure maxima in a protoplanetary disc. Therefore there is ample potential for complex interactions between the gas and dust material which we aim to study.

Hydrodynamic instabilities and gravoturbulent disk fractionation

Hydrodynamic instabilities may lead to vortex formation and thus initiate dust concentration in the inner Protoplanetary disk (<100Au) or lead to direct gravitational collapse and giant planet collapse in the outer disk.
We investigate various scenarios for the stability and involved timescales of those features in shearing boxes, global 2D and 3D simulations.