3:30–4:30 pm
ERC 161 - Zoom available - please contact lrebeles@oddjob.uchicago.edu ERC 161 - Zoom available - please contact lrebeles@oddjob.uchicago.edu
The ALMA’s View of Planet Formation
Understanding how planets form and evolve is essential for our searching of other habitable worlds across the Universe. Planets form inside the protoplanetary disks around young stars. These disks are analogs of our early Solar system at 4.6 billion years ago, providing precious windows for us to witness the formation of planets. Over the past few years, ALMA, the Atacama Large (sub)-millimeter Array, has been providing unprecedented resolution and sensitivity for us to study conditions inside proplanetary disks. One of the most remarkable discoveries is that substructures like gaps/rings appear to be prevalent in disks. It is therefore of great interest to characterize the physical/chemical properties at these gaps locations to test if they are carved by forming planets. I will talk about gas properties in five disks with prominent substructures at their gaps, with ~10 au ALMA resolution observations from part of the ALMA MAPS large program. I will also discuss the current debate about gas masses in protoplanetary disks and show that a combination of molecular tracers can improve the precision of mass measurements by 5-10x. Finally, I will talk about future synergy of ALMA and JWST observations to test large-scale volatile transportation in planet formation.