Abstract

Connecting the present-day demographics of planetary systems to their primordial populations requires an understanding of the dynamical processing planets undergo after formation. Hot Jupiters – giant planets with orbital periods under ten days – offer a powerful probe of this processing, given their likely origin at wider separations. While rare in the Galactic field, their high occurrence rate in the old open cluster M67 suggests that interactions with nearby stars in dense stellar environments play a role in converting giant planets on initially wide orbits into hot Jupiters through high-eccentricity migration. In this talk, I will present an efficient approach for modelling the long-term evolution of planetary systems under the influence of stochastic perturbations from passing stars in a cluster environment. I will discuss a selection of case studies linking the observed demographics in M67 to the primordial population of Jovian planets in the cluster.