2019 Physics/Theoretical Colloquium

 

Thursday, May 2nd , 2019

3:45 – 4:45 p.m.

Rosen Auditorium (TA-53, Bldg. 1)

Refreshments at 3:15pm

 

Speaker:  Hui Li

  

T-2: NUC & PARTICLE PHYS, ASTROPHYS & COSMOLOGY

Los Alamos National Laboratory

 

 

 

“From Dust Grains to Planets: Building New Worlds in Protoplanetary Disks around Nearby Stars "

 

 

 

Abstract: 

The last two decades saw the detection of more than 4000 confirmed exoplanets (planets around other stars) in > 3000 systems. An amazing amount of diversity in their planetary mass, orbital radius and eccentricity has raised a number of important questions: How did gas-giant planets in close-in orbits (hot Jupiters) form? What is the origin of super-Earth sized planets, for which we have no equivalent in the solar system? Do habitable planets exist outside our solar system? Some answers to these questions are being offered by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA, https://almascience.nrao.edu/), the most sensitive ground-based telescope in detecting the dust and gas in protoplanetary disks (PPDs) around young stars. As nurseries of planet formation, the high-resolution images of PPDs reveal how planets which are still forming can disturb their environment, producing rings, gaps, and vortices. We present theoretical and numerical studies of these systems to reproduce such complexity in their formation and evolution processes. This in turn allows us to infer the properties of forming planets and their likely future.