About the PLATO ESP workshop

PLATO is the next generation transit survey that uniquely combines large field of view, dynamic range, high sensitivity and observation duration. These properties make PLATO the ideal instrument to search for small planets in the light curves of bright stars.

This is the third PLATO Exoplanet thematic workshop on “Planetary interiors and system architectures”. The aims of the workshop are to discuss how PLATO may help us to understand planetary interiors and give new and more precise constraints on them, and to identify which open issues of planetary system architecture could be solved by PLATO’s future measurements. We will also discuss what was learned from earlier (CoRoT, Kepler, TESS and ground-based) measurements related to system architectures and how the observations are confronted by theory.

Invited speakers

Caroline Dorn – University of Zurich
James Owen – Imperial College London
Tristan Guilllot – Observatoire de Cote d’Azur
Richard Nelson – Queen Mary University of London
Dan Fabrycky – University of Chicago
Alexandre M. Correia – University of Coimbra

Questions? You can contact the organisers by sending an email to: psmoffice[at}warwick.ac.uk

Scientific Organising Committee

David Brown (University of Warwick, UK)
Juan Cabrera (DLR, Germany)
Szilárd Csizmadia (DLR, Germany)
Magali Deleuil (LAM, France)
Isabella Pagano (INAF-OACT, Italy)
Don Pollacco (University of Warwick, UK)
Heike Rauer (DLR, Germany)
Nuno Santos (CAUP, Portugal)
Paul A. Strøm (University of Warwick, UK)

Local Organising Committee

David Brown
Szilárd Csizmadia (chair)
Paul A. Strøm
Ruth Titz-Weider

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Scientific Questions

How can PLATO contribute to the deeper understanding of the mass-radius and mass-density diagrams of exoplanets?

How accurately can we measure the Love number from transit timing variations and from transit light curves? What can it add to the understanding of the planetary interiors?

What are the most interesting regions of the parameter space (period, orbital distance, mass, radius, stellar spectral type etc)?

How can PLATO’s high precision and fine transit observations help to detect planetary shape and transit timing variations?

What can (the lack and the observed) transit timing and duration variations can say about planetary interiors and and system architectures?

What did we learn about planetary system architectures from ground- and space-based missions? What types of systems exist?

How deeply do we know the architecture of systems by combining all surveys (0.1-100 AU);

What kind of predictions can we make for the findings of PLATO: what type of systems will it find?

Do the predictions of the planet formation and evolution theories agree with the findings of CoRoT, Kepler, K2 and TESS? What type of systems should PLATO search beyond the habitable zone planets?

Banner photo by Tom Gainor on Unsplash.