Towards a better understanding of planetary systems (Invited talk)

The burgeoning field of exoplanets has yielded thousands of discoveries, which collectively have the potential to help us better understand our place in the Universe. Every month more and more planetary systems are being discovered, some of them in highly exotic configurations never observed previously. A combination of different techniques and studies is needed to unveil the real nature of these planetary systems. In this seminar, I will review some of the most recent photometric surveys notably dedicated to finding Earth-size planets, such as TESS and SPECULOOS, and how the combination of their findings with ground-based spectroscopic surveys, such as CARMENES, can be used to discriminate between families of planets: rocky super-Earths, volatile-rich super-Earths, Neptunes, etc. I will also show how dynamical simulations help better understand each system's planetary architecture discovered by the methods mentioned above. Indeed, as it happens with studies of our own Solar System, to yield a deeper understanding of planetary architectures, we need to study each system as a whole, by taking into consideration the star, the planets and the minor bodies within the system (dust disks, main asteroid analogues, etc.). I will show how combining all these methods (photometry, spectroscopy, and dynamical simulations) is necessary to shed light on the real nature of a given planetary system.