Formation and evolution of habitable planets with seasons and tides

Project PlaneTS is focused on one of the big questions of science: are we alone in the Universe?

At this moment, we are urgently in need of improved models of the planet formation process in order to make reliable theoretical predictions.

The needed improvement comes from recent studies that argue that the evolution of life on Earth depended on the presence of seasons and ocean tides, which have so far not been taken into account in astronomy.

As these phenomena are caused by the tilt of Earth's rotation axis and our Moon, it is time to include planetary spins and satellite systems to the planet formation model.

This big step forwards towards realistic models of habitable planets has been a major challenge, but has recently become feasible with the publication of my unique N-body code TIDYMESS, which solves the orbit, spin and tidal evolution of chaotically interacting planets and moons.

With a novel approach for combining direct and secular integration methods, I will be able to obtain complete evolutions of ensembles of planet-moon systems and quantify the likelihood for planetary systems to produce a habitable planet with seasons and tides, i.e. Earth-Moon analogues.

Three capture mechanisms will be studied in detail: tidal capture, few-body interactions with in-situ formed moons, and dynamical friction with planetesimals.

The demographics of the ensemble will provide new insights into the formation of Earth-Moon analogues, while also quantifying their expected cosmic number density.

The results will be used to derive a novel statistical method that can be used by the community to include the effects of planetary spins and satellite systems in other large-scale planet formation models.

In conclusion, project PlaneTS represents a large step forwards in our understanding of the habitability of worlds by scrutinising the role played by seasons and tides.