Astronomy Colloquium

  I will review the standard scenario for planet formation, which was motived to explain our Solar System, and show that planet formation likely proceeded differently for many planetary systems discovered to date by Kepler. In addition, I will present a new model for orbital resonance. I will show that it explains the surprisingly small number of near commensurate orbits in multi-planet systems and accounts for the deficit of planet pairs at exact resonance and for the corresponding excess of pairs with slightly greater separation.