Stars with a mass clearly smaller than the Sun are called M dwarfs. These red stars outnumber solar-like stars by about a factor 10 in the local milky way. The population of planets around these stars is however still not well known. In this work we compare the properties of planets around M dwarfs (like their occurrence rate, their mass, their distance from the star etc.) as predicted by a theoretical model of planet formation with observations that have been obtained in the past few years by the NASA Kepler satellite. This allows to find out how well our theoretical model reproduces the observations, and where it has its shortcomings.
Contact:
christoph.mordasini@space.unibe.ch
