Arvind Gupta, NOIRLab
Searching for Snapshots of Giant Planet Migration: case studies of eccentric warm Jupiters with NEID
The production of Jupiter-sized planets with orbital periods of P < 10 days – “hot Jupiters” – has presented an enticing challenge for our understanding of exoplanet dynamics and planet formation. A number of viable migration models have been put forth, but post-migration orbital evolution often erases important clues to the dynamical history of individual systems, making it difficult to determine how much each formation channel contributes to the observed population. Case studies of warm Jupiters, which will have retained primordial orbit information, offer an opportunity to tackle this challenge. I will discuss new results of an ongoing warm Jupiter observing campaign with the NEID spectrograph on the WIYN 3.5-m telescope at Kitt Peak, highlighting several freshly confirmed systems and discussing the status of each system within the context of hot Jupiter formation. Among these is the highest eccentricity transiting planet yet discovered, which adds to the sparse sample of bona fide progenitors to hot Jupiters, and for which we recently captured a serendipitous measurement of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect.

Abi Saha, NOIRLab
Photometric Investigation of stars in the Galactic Bulge with DECam: a pathway for discoveries with Rubin/LSST
We expect to find fossil signatures of the earliest history of how the Galaxy came together embedded in the complex stellar population structure of the Galactic bulge, a topic that is ripe for investigations with Rubin/LSST.  While the methods of analyzing complex synthetic populations using photometric techniques is well advanced, the star fields in the bulge are a) extremely crowded, and b) severely affected by interstellar extinction that not only changes on angular scales of less than an arc-minute, but also deviates from the standard reddening law. I will recount a study using multi-band DECam imaging that addresses and (mostly) overcomes both of these technical issues, and produces results that contain some unexpected surprises that give us a glimpse of the kinds of discoveries that await Rubin/LSST.