Planet formation in disks around young stars - Livestream

Stars form in a few million years, a very short span compared to their billion-year lifetimes. Their formation is initiated by the accumulation of gravitationally collapsing material into a flattened disk, which first forms the central object and then forms planetary systems before it gets dispersed. Disks are thus intriguing objects that potentially hold the answers to many outstanding questions on how stars and planets form. How does material accrete toward the center? How does mass in the disk move around? Where and when do planets form? What determines their composition? How do stars disperse their disks? What is the role of magnetic fields?

With the advent of new facilities such as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope,

capable of peering through the obscuring cloud material to observe disks, we are getting closer toward answering some of these crucial questions. I will summarize our present understanding of how disks mediate star and planet formation, and discuss how new discoveries are leading to rapidly shifting paradigms in the field.

Speaker: Uma Gorti, SETI Institute

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