How do young stars blow away their planet-forming disks?

08.07.2016

Fr. 8. Juli 2016

Observations show that most young stars are surrounded by accretion disks, the sites in which planets form. Accretion disks evolve very rapidly to finally disappear in a few million years. There are different mechanisms that explain disk dispersal, in this talk I will focus in one of them: the evaporation of the disk by its central star, also known as photoevaporation. This process is driven by the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray emission from the young star, it is currently highly debated which of them is more important. The theory predicting disk photoevaporation was formulated more than a decade ago, but only recently we have obtained observational evidence to confirm it thanks to the Spitzer Space Telescope and to the Very Large Telescope in Chile. I will discuss the impact of disk photoevaporation in the final stages of star formation and in the planet formation process.


Sprache: Englisch | Language: English

Credits: NASA/JPL