Characterising the population of wide orbit exoplanets

• Applicant: Dr. Niall Deacon
• Subject Area: Astrophysics and Astronomy
• Term: from 2017 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 362356230

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
• Subproject of: SPP 1992: Exploring the diversity of extrasolar planets