Megan Reiter
Rice University, TX·Astronomy & Astrophysics·Early-career
Planets are built from the disk of gas and dust that surrounds a newborn star, so the lifetime of that disk sets a deadline for planet formation. Disks can drain inward onto the star or be evaporated from the inside out by the star's own ultraviolet light.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
- Topics
external photoevaporation
protoplanetary disks
planet formation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2029
What they work on
- Measure whether external photoevaporation, the stripping of a planet-forming disk by ultraviolet light from a nearby bright star, is a major influence on planet formation, using more than 100 hours of MUSE observations on the Very Large Telescope.
- Survey thousands of low-mass stars and their disks in high-mass star-forming regions of at least 1000 solar masses, a sample about 100 times larger than existing studies, to characterize disks across a wide range of radiation environments.
- Use spectral diagnostics of actively evaporating disks, separated from bright nebular background by integral field spectroscopy, to quantify how fast each disk is losing mass.
- Derive a scaling relationship between the incident ultraviolet flux a disk receives and its external photoevaporation rate, for use in theoretical models of exoplanet demographics.
More about the research
But a disk can also be stripped from the outside by ultraviolet light from a nearby, far brighter star, a process called external photoevaporation. That would cut short the time and raw material available to make planets. The effect has been seen in a handful of objects. Whether it matters for planets in general is unknown, and that is the question this CAREER project tackles.
Why it matters
Most stars are born in crowded regions near bright, massive stars, so if external photoevaporation strips disks quickly it would change expectations for how common planets are and where they form. A measured relationship between ultraviolet exposure and disk mass loss would give theoretical models of exoplanet populations a calibrated input. The methods and trained observers also prepare the field for 30-meter class telescopes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Alanna Hughes
Wesleyan University, CT·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Improve methods for analyzing centimeter-wavelength (microwave) continuum emission from protoplanetary disks, focusing on VLA observations.
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
Rice University: 24 labs on PI Pages, $278M a year on research, 267 research doctorates a year.
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