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SPS Seminar - Effects of dynamical interactions on stars and planets in their birth environment

Dates
Thursday, March 9, 2023 - 14:00 to 15:00

When:  Thursday 9 March at 14.00

Where:  Microsoft Teams -Online

Speaker:  Christina Schoettler – Imperial College London

Hosted by: Hugh Dickinson

Abstract:

Most stars form in grouped or clustered environments with other stars. These star-forming regions can survive for millions of years but can change dramatically over just a short period of time - either collapsing under their own gravity or expanding. So, what we see today might not be what they looked like initially during their formation. While a cluster is contracting or expanding, stars can pass very close to each other. This can lead to them being flung out of their birth region to become runaway stars. Planets that might already exist in an exoplanet system may have their orbits altered compared to their formation, be ejected from their system, be stolen by passing stars or collide with each other. In this seminar, I will discuss how N-body simulations and observations can be used to investigate these interactions. I will talk about how runaway stars can tell us something about the initial conditions of these regions. How observations from telescopes like Gaia, can be used to search for these ejected stars in the night sky. I will then move on to the planetary systems and how they are affected and possibly altered by interactions in their birth environment. In particular, I will discuss, if the Kepler dichotomy (the apparent excess of single-transit systems compared to multi-transit systems) can be explained by birth environment interactions.

 

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