MSI Seminar

Tracing the building blocks of planet formation through protoplanetary discs

James Owen

Imperial College London

We are about to enter an era where high precision spectra of exoplanets will become routine. One of the primary goals of this research program is to trace the atmospheric composition back to the planet-forming environment and infer how they were assembled. However, I will discuss how our knowledge of the composition of the planet-forming environments is woefully incomplete. I will present an overview of the problem and some of the current models. I will discuss how these processes are coupled. Both with forming planets feeding back onto the composition of their parent discs, perhaps explaining the under abundance of our Sun in refractory elements compared to nearby Solar-twins, and the chemistry feeding back on the disc structure creating a rich area for future research.