Over the last few decades astronomers have discovered thousands of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun – known as exoplanets. Many of these exoplanets are quite unlike anything we see in our Solar System. These include ‘hot Jupiters’ orbiting very close to their parent star and rocky ‘super Earths’ many times larger than our home planet. In this free course, The formation of exoplanets, you will learn about the challenges connected with efforts to reconcile the observed exoplanet population with current theories on how planets form. The two main theories for this, namely the core-accretion scenario and the disc-instability scenario, will be explored mathematically.