Seminars at FGG
Global Architecture of Planetary Systems: GAPS
Speaker: Riccardo Claudi (INAF Astronomical Observatory of Padova)
Date and time: 2013-04-02 11:00
GAPS is an Italian project devoted to understanding the architectural properties of planetary systems in connection with the characteristics of their host stars, taking advantage of the surgical (≤1 m/s) radial velocity precision provided by HARPS-N @ TNG. This project is the result of a concerted collaborative effort of a large fraction of the Italian community interested in exoplanets together with few well known foreign experts. This team has joined forces and its long-term expertise in high resolution spectroscopy, stellar rotation and activity, crowded stellar environments, formation of planetary systems, planetary dynamics, and data handling, with the aim to achieve the overarching goals of the program. These goals include the detection of low-mass planets around northern low mass stars and metal-poor stars, the search for new companions in already known planetary systems, and the testing of migration mechanism and tidal and magnetic interactions between planets and host stars. Star-planet and planet-disk gravitational interactions are also studied with the innovative measurement of the Rossiter Mac Laughlin effect. Finally, another main theme of GAPS is to assess the frequency of planets in crowded and dense stellar environments. The above issues can only be tackled and eventually disentangled in a coherent way through an ambitious, challenging and long term observational program.