Colloquium on Apr. 16, 2026

Know Thy (Cold) Jupiter, Know Thy (Super) Earth

Speaker: Wei Zhu (Tsinghua University)

Venue: SWIFAR Building 2111

Time: 16:00 PM, Thursday, Apr. 16, 2026

Abstract:

One key feature of Solar System is that it contains gas giants at wide orbits and small terrestrial planets at the inner region. The gas giants, especially Jupiter and Saturn, have played important roles in shaping the architecture of the whole system and (likely) maintaining the habitable environment of Earth. Since 1990s, thousands of planets beyond the solar system have been detected. The majority of the known exoplanetary systems are quite different from our own, but it turns out that many of them share the similar feature with small planets at close orbits and gas giants at wide orbits. In this talk, I will first review how this general feature was found and what it means to the ubiquity/uniqueness of the Solar System. Focusing on giant planets, I will then show how we can use planetary spin as a novel probe into their formation and evolution.