Eve Lee
University of California-San Diego, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Planets form inside protoplanetary disks, the spinning disks of gas and dust around young stars. How that process unfolds in detail is still uncertain.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
- Topics
planet formation
protoplanetary disks
dust rings
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Separate the effects of dust-gas coupling, the Stokes number (St), from gas turbulence, the effective viscosity (alpha), by applying the dust equation of motion to a large sample of protoplanetary disks with rings.
- Simulate how dust clumps form and gain mass inside rings using the GIZMO hydrodynamic code with self-gravity, covering the observed range of St and alpha.
- Predict the planet mass function at orbits of several to tens of astronomical units by combining the simulations with the galactic distribution of star, disk and environmental properties.
More about the research
Two unknowns matter most. One is how turbulent the gas is. The other is how tightly dust grains are carried along by the gas. Many observed disks show bright rings of dust, which may be places where planets are born. Pinning down these starting conditions would let theories predict which planets should exist, including ones too small to detect today.
Why it matters
This is theoretical basic science. The work aims to link the hidden physical conditions inside planet-forming disks to the exoplanets astronomers actually find. Its specific predictions of how many planets of each mass form at different distances from their stars can be checked by upcoming exoplanet surveys. That could help explain how planetary systems, including ones like our own, come to be.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alanna Hughes
Wesleyan University, CT·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Improve methods for analyzing centimeter-wavelength (microwave) continuum emission from protoplanetary disks, focusing on VLA observations.
Adam Ginsburg
University of Florida, FL·Astronomy & Astrophysics·Early-career
Measure how fast and how much gas flows from parsec-scale clouds into ~1000 AU cores across 259 star-forming clumps in the ALMA Panta Rei survey, using dense-gas and infall/outflow molecular tracers.
Jonathan Williams
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Measure carbon monoxide in the inner, terrestrial planet-forming region of young disks (within about 5 au) using infrared spectroscopy from the Keck Observatory and NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility.
The school
University of California-San Diego: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 637 research doctorates a year.
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