25 years of Exoplanets:What Have We Learned So Far|Manoj Puravankara|Winter School on Astronomy 2020
Channel: Astronomy Winter School
Date: 2020-06-26

Until about 1995, the only planetary system that we knew of was our own solar system. The first extrasolar planet or exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star was discovered by Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz in 1995, for which they were awarded the Physics Nobel prize last year. Since then, several thousand exoplanets have been discovered, and the current count has crossed 4000. It is now possible to carry out detailed and statistically meaningful demographic studies of exoplanets. Results from such studies are beginning to challenge our traditional ideas about planetary systems and their formation mechanisms that has been historically shaped by the observed properties of our solar system. In this talk, he briefly summarises what we have learned so far about exoplanetary systems and the implications of these results for our understanding of the formation of planetary systems.

Manoj is currently a faculty member at the Dept. of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.  He is a part of the Infrared and Optical Astronomy group at the department. Before joining TIFR, he worked as a Research Associate at University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy & Astrophyscis, Taipei, Taiwan and at the Inter-University Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics, Pune, India. He worked for his Ph. D. at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, India, and obtained his doctoral degree in 2005. His primary research interests are in the area of star and planet formation. He seeks to understand the early evolution of new born stars (protostars) and the formation and subsequent evolution of protoplanetary disks -- the birth places of planetary systems.