Star and Planet Formation Discussion Group
 Thursday Meetings
Bryant conference room (217)

NEXT MEETING:
  April 17, 12.00pm

Novemver 29	Brian Lee (UF) Selection of Target Stars for MALRVELS (a Radial Velocity Planet Survey)
Novemver 15	Nadya Gorlova (UF) On the Correlation Between Stellar Mass and Planet Incidence (article review)
Suggested reading	A new planet around M dwarf: revealing a correlation between exoplanets and stellar mass Johnson et al. (astro-ph / 16 Jul 2007) Planet formation around stars of various masses: the snow line and the frequency of giant planets Kennedy & Kenyon (astro-ph / 4 Oct 2007)
Novemver 1	Dimitri Veras & Suvrah Mahadevan (UF) Summary of the DPS Meeting in Orlando
October 11	Fabian Heitsch (Michigan) TBD
October 04	Eric Ford (UF) Characterizing the Orbital Eccentricities of Transiting Extrasolar Planets with Photometric Observations
Abstract	The discovery of over 200 extrasolar planets with the radial velocity         (RV) technique has revealed that many giant planets have large eccentricities (Butler et al. 2006), in striking contrast with most of the planets in the solar system and prior theories of planet formation.  The realization that many giant planets have large eccentricities raises a fundamental question: ``Do terrestrial-size planets of other stars typically have significantly eccentric orbits or nearly circular orbits like the Earth?''  On one hand, the idea that our solar system is special appears to fly in the face of the Copernican principle. On the other hand, most of the known giant planets of FGK stars have sizable eccentricities, and these eccentric giant planets would inevitably perturb the orbits of any nearby terrestrial planets.  Here, we demonstrate that photometric observations of transiting planets could be used to characterize the orbital eccentricities for individual transiting planets, as well the eccentricity distribution for various populations of transiting planets (e.g., those with a certain range of orbital periods or physical sizes).  Such characterizations can provide valuable constraints on theories for the excitation of eccentricities and tidal dissipation.  We outline the future prospects of the technique given the exciting prospects for future transit searches, such as those to be carried out by the CoRoT and Kepler missions.