event
Wednesday 04 Dec 2019: [Seminar] Building Planetary Systems
Prof Richard Alexander - University of Leicester
4th floor, Physics building 14:00-15:00
The last several years have seen an explosion in our knowledge of extra-solar planets, and we now know of thousands of exoplanet systems with an extraordinary range of properties. These planets formed in cold discs of dust and gas around young, newly-formed stars, and recently we have also seen major advances in our observations of such discs. In this talk I will discuss how these protoplanetary discs shape the formation and evolution of planetary systems, and how planets and other processes can give rise to observable structures in their parent discs. I will present new models of protoplanetary disc winds, and show how forbidden emission lines can be used to measure the properties of these winds and their effects on disc evolution. I will also present new models of planet-disc interactions, and look in particular at the dynamics and observable signatures of planets on inclined orbits. Finally I will discuss how we can apply these results more broadly, and what we can hope to learn in the coming years.
