Join us in congratulating SPP 1992 PhD student Jan-Vincent Harre, who successfully defended his thesis ‘Origins & Orbital Evolution of Hot and Warm Jupiters’ last week at TU Berlin. During his time in the SPP, Jan worked with a variety of space and ground-based data to investigate the lifetimes of hot Jupiters, some of which are spiraling towards their host stars as a result of tidally induced orbital decay. After a secondment to Japan, he also learned how to measure the stellar obliquity (spin-orbit angle) of exoplanetary systems, finding the warm Jupiter WASP-106b to orbit in the equatorial plane of its star. This forms part of the growing evidence that hot Jupiters and warm Jupiters (typically defined as having orbital periods greater than about 10 days) arrived in their present orbits via different mechanisms. We wish Dr Harre all the very best for the future!
