The number of known planets outside our Solar system has in recent years grown from a handful to a few thousand. Some of these systems have quite exotic planets; such as the recently imaged HD131399 system, which contains three stars and a large planet; and the "Super Saturn"-like ring planet J1407b. In many other systems, the planets are now at locations where they could not have formed, requiring some type of migration to have taken place.
Since most stars form in clustered fashion, the stellar density in their birth environment is relatively high. This makes stellar encounters that could be responsible for such migration possible. In order to get a good estimate of how frequent such encounters really are, accurate modelling of young stellar regions is required. To this end, we create models of observed stellar regions using data from the MYStIX (Massive Young Stellar regions in Infra-red and X-ray) survey and simulate them with AMUSE, the Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment. These simulations include gravity, gas dynamics, stellar evolution and binary/multiple stellar systems.
In my talk, I will discuss these models, as well as several other aspects of my ongoing work to simulate these regions, the encounters therein and the possible resulting planetary systems.