Understanding the evolution of planetary systems with GAPS

The Global Architecture of Planetary Systems (GAPS) project, gathers a large part of the Italian community working on exoplanets by using the high resolution spectrographs mounted at the TNG. In particular, the Young Objects sub-program aims to investigate the origin of the observed diversity of the planetary systems by observing them at young ages (up to a few hundreds of Myr), when planets are closer to their formation time and possibly to their birth-sites, and the formation and evolution processes are still at play. The main difficulty in this kind of study is the high level of stellar activity of the host stars, able to mask planet-induced signals in radial velocity time series. For a proper treatment of the high level of the stellar activity, typical for these objects, we work to improve the RV extraction and exploit the Gaussian process regression modelling, supported by an intensive RV monitoring.
I will review the main results of this ongoing survey, including the confirmation and the retraction of known planet candidates, the contribution in the evaluation of the frequency rate of planets around young stars, and the characterization of young transiting planets with the measurement of their mass. The determination of the stellar properties such as the age and membership to groups, and chemical composition is also a fundamental part of our work, as well as simulations of the planetary atmosphere photo-evaporation and the dynamical scenarios of the systems.
All these studies contribute to unveil the still poorly known scenario of the formation and evolution of young close-in planets.