Insight into planetary formation pathways from resonant architectures

Close-in Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes orbit about half of Sun-like stars. To constrain their formation pathways, observed system architectures are statistically compared to simulations. To this end, systems near mean motion resonances are especially informative, as their architecture depends sensitively on evolutionary history and can be precisely characterized via transit timing variations (TTVs).

However, data analyses and simulations are produced by different teams and shared heterogeneously, often leading to information loss. To address this, we developed the resonantstate databases, which compiles TTV posteriors for hundreds of near-resonant systems and the evolution of tens of thousands of simulated systems that evolved by different physical processes (including accretion, planet-disk interactions, dynamical evolution, and tidal dissipation, etc.), all in a common framework.

 

After mentioning recent results on the statistical comparison of observed and simulated resonant systems, I will show how these newly established database can be used to further our understanding of the processes that shape this population of close-in sub-Neptunes, from processes that happened during the proto-planetary disk lifetime, to hundreds of million or billion of years of post-disk evolution.