Title: The problem of detecting co-orbital planets
Speaker: Paula Granados
Date: Nov 19 at 14:30
Location: R124, Physics Building
Abstract:
Co-orbital objects are bodies that share the same orbit around a central mass, but that does not necessarily have a hierarchical setup like the Sun-Earth-Moon system. A typical example of co-orbital objects in the solar systems is the Trojan objects sharing the orbit with Jupiter. However, co-orbital objects were predicted before their detection as special solutions to the circular restricted three-body problem. Nowadays, with the constant discovery of exoplanets, the question of the possible existence of co-orbital (exo)planets has been raised by several researchers. In this talk, I will introduce what co-orbital objects are, whether co-orbital objects differ from co-orbital planets and how to explain why detecting co-orbital (exo)planets are important and present several attempts to detect them.
