ASLI Weekly Meeting

Catching Planetary Systems at Birth.
Prof. Phil Armitage
Over the last 25 years, several thousand planetary systems have been discovered orbiting other stars. Almost all of those stars, however, are billions of years old, with planetary systems that are similarly mature as the Solar System. Recently, the first examples have been found of truly young planetary systems, with planets that are still accreting and interacting with the gas and dust disks from which they formed. In this talk, I will discuss what we know about this new class of newborn planets, and how they may reveal clues to still-mysterious aspects of the planet formation process.
Prof. Phil Armitage is a theoretical astrophysicist in the Stony Brook Physics & Astronomy Department. He is interested in the formation of planetary systems and the astrophysics of black holes.