Colloquium on May. 9th, 2019

Planetary systems in star clusters

Speaker: Thijs Kouwenhoven (Xi’an Jiaotong-liverpool University)

Venue: Room 2317, SWIFAR Building

Time: 3:00 PM, Thursday, 9th May, 2019

Abstract: 

Most stars, perhaps even all stars, form in crowded stellar environments. Such star forming regions typically dissolve within several tens of millions of years, while others remain bound for hundreds of millions to billions of years, and form the star clusters we find in our Galaxy today. A large fraction of stars in the Galaxy hosts planetary systems. To understand the origin and dynamical evolution of such exoplanet systems, it is necessary to carefully study the interplay between internal planetary dynamics and external stellar perturbations. We combine theoretical estimates with state-of-the-art numerical simulations of evolving planetary systems in different star cluster environments. We combine planetary system evolution codes with the NBODY6++GPU star cluster simulation code, by integrating them using the AMUSE multi-physics environment. We constrain the effect of external perturbations in different environments on the planets and debris structures of a wide variety of planetary systems, and follow the kinematics of debris ejected from planetary systems. Understanding the evolution of young planetary systems can help us further constrain the abundance of habitable exoplanets of exoplanets, both in star clusters and in the Galactic field.

Personal Information:

M.B.N. (Thijs) Kouwenhoven obtained his PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) in 2002, after which he worked as a research associate in the United Kingdom. In 2009, he joined the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (Peking University) as a Bairen Research Professor, where he carried out research on planetary dynamics. At the same time, he was awarded the 2009 Gruber Fellowship Prize by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Eight years later, he joined the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou, where he currently leads the astrophysics research group. As the director of the East-Asia Office of Astronomy for Development, he leads the development efforts of the International Astronomical Union in the East-Asia region. His research interests include exoplanets, planetary system dynamics, computational astrophysics, and star cluster dynamics.