On the shoulders of giants

Session

Formation of gaseous giant planets and their impact on short-period low-mass planets: from solar system to exoplanetary systems

25 Mar 2026, 10:10

Archivio di Stato - Torino, Italy

5. The big and the small: how giant planets shape their smaller neighbours (invited talk)

Dr Bertram Bitsch (University College Cork, Ireland)

25/03/2026, 10:10

Oral contribution

Planets form in protoplanetary discs surrounding newly formed stars, where dust
grains clump and form km-sized planetesimals. As the dust grains start to grow to mm-cm
sized pebbles, they drift inwards very rapidly due to the gas drag within the disc. As the
pebbles drift inwards towards the hotter disc regions, they can evaporate and enrich the
inner disc with their vapor to largely...

6. Super Earth formation in systems with cold giants

Claudia Danti (Center for Star and Planet Formation, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

25/03/2026, 10:40

Oral contribution

Exoplanetary demographic statistics shows that super-Earths are the most
abundant exoplanets, orbiting approximately every other solar-like star. In our own solar system, however, the inner terrestrial planets did not grow beyond Earth in mass. A possible explanation could be provided by the presence of gas giants in our own system, that might have influenced the growth of the inner...

8. Kepler-139: A case of Sweeping Secular Resonances leading to system non uniformity

Matthew Doty (Rice University, USA)

25/03/2026, 11:30

Oral contribution

Understanding and testing possible formation mechanisms is crucial to
understanding the history of planetary systems. While observationally there is a prevalence of evenly sized and spaced systems (“peas-in-a-pod” - Weiss et. al 2018), there is also an observational trend between the presence of a Cold Jupiter and inner system non-uniformity (He et. al 2023). Recent work explored in Best et....

48. Giant Planets Grow to at Most 2% of Host Mass via Core Accretion

Dr Keming Zhang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

25/03/2026, 11:45

Oral contribution

I make the case for q < 0.02 as a working definition for giant planets based on their formation via core accretion. Analyzing microlensing surveys sensitive to giant planets on 1–10 au orbits, my recent work (Zhang 2025; ApJL 995, L55) showed that the giant-planet mass-ratio distribution follows a power law that is sharply truncated at q = 0.017–0.02 (95% CI). Similar mass-ratio boundaries are...