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