[PLS] Kate Follette (Amherst College)

“Too Big to Form: Accreting Planetary Mass Companions as a Key Piece of the Planet Formation Puzzle”

We are entering an exciting era where it is possible to directly constrain the formation pathways of giant planets by imaging planetary systems still in the act of forming from their circumstellar environment. Breadcrumbs of formation physics are sprinkled amidst detection and characterization studies of forming protoplanets and young brown dwarf companions (so-called “Planetary Mass Companions”, or PMCs), as well as high-contrast imaging studies of circumstellar and circumplanetary disks. In this talk, I will describe my group’s efforts to find and characterize accreting planets, paying particular attention to the open questions inherent in the process of translating observed object properties (e.g. contrast at an accretion-tracing wavelength) to physically-meaningful ones (e.g. mass accretion rate). I will present recent ground and space-based multi-wavelength observational efforts, as well as simulation and metaanalysis efforts, that share the broad goal of informing the properties of PMCs on a population-level. They speak strongly to the promise of JWST for disentangling the various hypothesized formation pathways for these puzzling super-massive planetary companions.

Planetary Lunch Seminar —

Colloquia topics span the range of research interests of the department’s planetary sciences research program, and the talks are intended to appeal to any graduate students, postdocs, research scientists, and faculty with a background in planetary science. Speakers include members of the MIT community and visitors.

Contact: planetary-org@mit.edu