This project seeks to discover new cold planets in very wide orbits around other stars. These are hard to find as they are cold and do not appear to form in current planet formation models. My plan is to detect these planets using space telescope as they are too cold and faint to discover from the ground. Discovering more of these and characterising their orbits and chemical composition will allow me to determine if planets in orbits hundreds of times wider than planets in the solar system are formed closer to their stars and kicked into wider orbits. If wide orbit planets form in such a way, then they will have a strong effect on all planets orbiting their parent star, altering the architectures of a significant fraction of exoplanetary systems
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
