Planets on the Edge

The Kepler and TESS missions, as well as ground-based telescopes, have discovered thousands of planets on short-period orbits around other stars, including many that are Earth-size and likely to be rocky. These objects have no direct counterparts in the Solar System, and the corresponding inner regions within the protoplanetary disks that spawned them are challenging to study. This conference will confront this challenge and advance our understanding of the nature, formation and evolution of Earth-sized planets in inner protoplanetary disks by bringing together diverse experts in exoplanet demographics, protoplanetary disks, models of disks and planet formation, and meteoritics to address four key questions: (1) what is the nature of close-in rocky planets and their atmospheres? (2) do they form in situ or migrate inwards after forming further out? (3) what are the governing parameters that could vary between star systems? and (4) why are there no analogous planets around the Sun? The conference will complement and energize the associated KITP Program by including a broader range of participants and highlighting recent observational results. The goals of the conference are to synthesize current knowledge of the properties of planets and inner disks, describe the state of the art in models of planet formation and evolution, catalyze interactions between different fields, and chart a path forward for advances in observations, theory, and computational modeling.