The Formation and Evolution of resonant planetary Systems

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As of today over 2600 exoplanetary systems that contain over 3500 planets have been discovered. This large sample of exoplanets provides us with the possibility to perform detailed statistical analyses of the orbital properties of the multi-planet systems that lie in the focus of this proposed research. Planets form in protoplanetary disks and gravitational interactions between the disk matter and the growing protoplanets will lead to a change and evolution of their orbital elements. Hence, it is the combined, coupled evolution of the disk and the embedded planets that determine the final dynamical outcome of planetary systems and the configurations that we can observe today. In case of differential radial migration of the planets a common outcome is the formation of resonant configurations, in which the orbital periods of the planets have an integer ratio. This is indeed observed for many systems and sometimes even more complex resonances involving three or even four planets are observed. However, the overall numbers of resonant systems is smaller than what might have been expected, and the period-ratio distribution of neighboring planets is rather smooth but displays peculiar enhancements just outside the nominal resonant locations. It is the goal of this proposal to understand the overall distribution of orbital elements of the whole sample of exoplanets as well as creating evolutionary histories of special individual systems with exciting orbital dynamics. To achieve this goal we plan to perform coupled hydrodynamical and N-body simulations that will be compared in detail with the available observational data sets and prepare for analyses of Gaia and PLATO data.