Dept Colloquium: Sierra Grant, Carnegie

Building new worlds: Witnessing star, planet, and moon formation with JWST

Speaker: Sierra Grant, Carnegie

Abstract: Stars are born surrounded by disks of gas and dust, which are the birth places of planets. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can uniquely peer into these planetary nurseries, allowing us to determine what ingredients planets are forming from. I will discuss the water-rich disks around stars like our Sun and the carbon-rich disks around very small stars. Finally, I will show that we are entering a new era of discovery, as JWST is allowing us to probe, for the first time, disks around planets themselves, which are the construction sites for moons.

Host: Dr. Lori Feaga