Astronomy Colloquium

In this talk I will present recent progress in direct observations of giant exoplanets with JWST. I will review a handful of results obtained over the past couple of years and discuss how they will eventually be tied to our solar system and broader exoplanet demographics obtained using indirect methods. I will first show how the JWST coronagraph enables a unique reconnaissance of the outskirts of exo-solar systems, in a mass-separation regime inaccessible before, and discuss the emergence of a simple yet powerful color classification system. I will then focus on broader exoplanet architectures, emphasizing the importance of detailed observations of systems harboring at least two giant exoplanets. I will describe how, using a combination of techniques, we now have a clear picture of eccentricities across a wide range of semi-major axes and discuss a few formation and evolution scenarios consistent with this empirical picture. Finally, I will argue that important clues about these scenarios can be garnered from detailed spectroscopic observations of those same giant planets. I will illustrate this point by highlighting recent insights obtained using JWST NIRSpec and show how the longer wavelengths of JWST MIRI open a new avenue for such work. I will close by sharing my optimism regarding the near future of giant exoplanet observations: never before have our observational capabilities spanned such a broad range of observables (wavelength in particular) and astrophysics (semi-major axis in particular).