CGCA Seminar – Abygail Waggoner

What’s Feeding Terrestrial Planets? JWST Observations of Protoplanetary Disk

Dr. Abygail Waggoner
University of Wisconsin-Madison

The formation of terrestrial, or earth-like, planets is thought to occur in the inner few au of protoplanetary disks, but what is the composition of the dust and gas that forming-planets may inherit? In this talk, we’ll discuss how the James Webb Space Telescope can be used to measure the chemical composition of protoplanetary disk gas and how models can be used to understand the evolution of material throughout planet formation. We will focus specifically on results from the ALMA/JWST survey of Gas Evolution in PROtoplanetary disks (AGE-PRO) large collaboration (PI: Ke Zhang). AGE-PRO uses a combination of ALMA observations, JWST observations, and chemical disk models of thirty protoplanetary disks spanning the planet formation process (~0.5 to 6 Myr old) to gain a (relatively) comprehensive picture of gas and dust evolution of planet formation.