Contributions > By speaker > Thomas Coleman

In an era when we are charting multiple planets per system, one might wonder the extent to which failing to detect a planet can skew our interpretation of the system architecture. We address this question with a simple experiment: we remove planets from a large, homogenous catalog and monitor how several metrics of the system architecture change. We performed this test on a catalog of observed exoplanets and, separately, on a catalog of synthetic systems with underlying hyper-parameters that are fit to reproduce the observed systems as faithfully as possible. For both samples, we find that the failure to detect one or more planets tends to create more irregularly spaced planets, whereas the planet mass similarity and coplanarity are unaffected. This work is currently being expanded into the regime of long-period giant planets by conducting follow up observations of systems with irregularly spaced inner planets and at least one long-period giant planet to determine if high irregularity in spacing is caused by the presence of an outer-giant.