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NASA/JPL-Caltech
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| Protoplanetary Disks and the Hunt for the Youngest Exoplanets |
| Sean Andrews |
| Thursday, Apr 14, 2011 at 8:00 PM |
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Hundreds of exoplanets have been discovered around nearby stars and a massive effort is underway to find more of them, determine their key properties, and explain demographic trends with models of their formation. But associating the current exoplanet properties with their formation epoch can be problematic, since the formation process is intimately associated with the physical conditions associated with their birthplaces: the disks of gas and dust that orbit young stars. Ideally, the mature exoplanet systems could be compared with their younger counterparts that are "caught in the act" of formation, still embedded in their natal disks. The direct detection of a planet orbiting a young star is currently a challenge. However, some properties of young planets can be inferred indirectly, through their disruptive influence on the structure of the remnant disk material. I will discuss some recent observations that highlight the potential of a new technique that can be used to hunt for very young exoplanets, based on high resolution radio-wave imaging of their associated protoplanetary disks.
Speaker Bio
Sean Andrews was born and raised just outside Chicago, Illinois. He received undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics from Northwestern University, and obtained a PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii for his work on "Submillimeter-Wave Constraints on Circumstellar Disk Evolution". In the fall of 2007, he came to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a Hubble Fellow. This past fall, he joined the scientific staff of the radio astronomy division at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Much of his research work is focused on using high angular resolution radio-wavelength observations to measure the properties of the planet-forming disks around young stars.
Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner discussion at Changsho, 1712 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA at 6:00pm before the meeting. |
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