The Long, Hot Summer: What Short Period Planets Are Revealing About Planet Formation, Migration, and Evolution

Watch a 47-minute conference talk by Dr. Jessie Christiansen from NASA titled "The Long, Hot Summer: What Short Period Planets Are Revealing About Planet Formation, Migration, and Evolution," presented at the Planets on the Edge KITP conference held at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. Explore how discoveries from the Kepler and TESS missions, along with ground-based telescopes, have revealed thousands of short-period exoplanets with no direct counterparts in our Solar System. Learn about the challenges in studying these Earth-sized rocky planets and their formation environments within inner protoplanetary disks. The presentation addresses key questions about the nature of close-in rocky planets and their atmospheres, whether they form in place or migrate inward, what parameters vary between star systems, and why similar planets don't exist around our Sun. This talk is part of a broader conference bringing together experts in exoplanet demographics, protoplanetary disks, planet formation models, and meteoritics to synthesize current knowledge and chart future research directions.