Daniel Tamayo, Harvey Mudd College
When
Refreshments served from 3:00 - 3:30 in the 3rd Floor Atrium
TAP Dynamics Initiative Lecture
Daniel Tamayo, Harvey Mudd College
Title: Toward a Theory of how Chaos Drives Dynamical Instabilities and Shapes Compact Exoplanet Systems
Abstract: While several processes are thought to be important in the early phase of planet formation, most theories converge on a final stage dominated by giant impacts that set the ultimate masses and orbital architectures that we observe today in exoplanet systems. Nevertheless, despite enormous theoretical effort, we do not yet fully understand the dynamical processes driving chaos in such systems, and we are unable to predict a priori which regions in the space of possible orbital configurations will be long-term stable, and which will lead to instability. As a motivation, I will first present our recent work suggesting that dynamical instabilities have indeed strongly shaped the observed distribution of exoplanetary systems. I will then survey our current understanding of chaos in planetary systems, discuss recent theoretical developments, and close with a roadmap of ongoing work and open questions.
Bio: Dan Tamayo is an assistant professor in the physics department at Harvey Mudd College in the greater Los Angeles area. He grew up in northern Spain, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia, and obtained his Ph.D. in Astronomy & Space Sciences at Cornell University. Before joining the faculty at Harvey Mudd College he was a Centre for Planetary Sciences postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and a NASA Sagan fellow at Princeton. His graduate work with the Cassini mission around Saturn focused on the collisional evolution of Saturn's small, distant irregular satellites. His subsequent work has focused on numerical integration algorithms for planetary orbital dynamics as a lead developer of the REBOUND N-body package, and on theoretical and machine learning approaches to predicting the stability of exoplanet orbital configurations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/science/trappist-earth-size-planets-…;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/11/w…