Aspen Winter Conference
Exoplanet Systems and Stellar Life Cycles:
Late-Stage and Post-MS Systems
March 19-24, 2023
All participants and speakers must apply online for the program.
The deadline for this conference has passed (October 15th, 2022).
Please feel free to reach out to the conference organizers if you would like more information.
Overview
The growing population of exoplanets and the expanding repertoire of instruments and analysis techniques have moved the astrophysical domain of exoplanets from an era of individual system discoveries to a golden age of population-level scientific advances. With new and expected instruments and methods, we can examine the entire life cycles of planets and planetary systems. This Aspen Winter Conference will bring together leading scientific experts to explore the relationship between exoplanet demographics, stellar evolution, and stellar dynamics. The conference will focus on late-stage exoplanetary systems, including evolved stars and white dwarf hosts. Conference attendees will address and summarize what these relationships reveal about the underlying processes of the formation and evolution of planetary systems.
In this one-week, interdisciplinary workshop, we will bring together experts in time-domain astronomy, dynamics, stellar evolution, stellar rotation, asteroseismology, and planetary science to address two major open questions related to late-stage exoplanetary systems.
What can we learn about planet formation and evolution from the demographics of exoplanets orbiting post-main-sequence stars?
What can we learn about the chemical history and bulk planetary composition from accretion signatures and post-MS planetary ingestion investigations?
Specific late-stage topics to be addressed:
Detection and follow-up of planets around late-stage stars
Accretion signatures and atmospheric mixing in white dwarfs
Rotational and abundance signatures in evolved stars that have ingested planets
Dynamical effects and the resulting orbital architectures
Tidal in-spiral and angular momentum transfer (uncertainties in the common envelope phase)
Models of the origins of polluting materials
Uncertainties in RBG/AGB stellar models
Organizers:
Melinda Soares-Furtado | University of Wisconsin-Madison | mmsoares@wisc.edu
Brian Jackson | Boise State University| BJackson@boisestate.edu
Andrew Vanderburg | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | andrewv@mit.edu
Elisabeth Adams | Planetary Science Institute | adams@psi.edu
Scientific Advisor:
Jason Steffen | University of Nevada, Las Vegas | jason.steffen@unlv.edu
Aspen Center for Physics
700 Gillespie Ave
Aspen, CO 81611
ph: 970 925 2585
email: acp@aspenphys.org
About the Aspen Center for Physics:
The essence of the work at the Aspen Center for Physics lies in thought and communication. Set in a friendly, small town of inspiring landscapes, the Center is conducive to deep thinking with few distractions or demands. Physicists work at their own speeds and in their own ways: alone or together, at the desk, at the blackboard, or in a chair on the lawn. Spontaneous discussions give rise to new collaborations.
The Center encourages individual and collaborative research and offers summer workshops and winter conferences in biophysics, astrophysics and cosmology, particle physics, and condensed matter physics. Cross-scientific workshops with other disciplines are scheduled when physics is central to the topic. Each year, over 1,000 scientists from around the world visit the Center to explore new research on the unanswered questions about our world and universe.
This event is part of the 2023 Aspen Center of Physics Winter Conference program.
The Aspen Center for Physics is supported by the National Science Foundation grant No. PHY-1607611.
Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
The Aspen Center for Physics in committed to a significant participation of women and under-represented groups in all of its programs.