Connecting theories and observations of planet formation

In the last 20 years, exoplanet science has grown from science fiction to one of the most important fields in astrophysics. We now know thousand of planets around other stars and we have learned that other planetary systems are very diverse and look very different from the Solar System. Yet we still do not know how planets form, because all the planets we have discovered are around "adult" stars. To solve this problem, in my research I study the planet "nurseries": proto-planetary discs. Thanks to new, cutting-edge facilities, such as ALMA, the most expensive ground-based telescope ever built, and the instrument SPHERE on the Very Large Telescope, we can now study these discs in unprecedented detail.

Thanks to these facilities, we can now understand that young, forming planets are present in these discs. Even if cannot see directly these planets, they leave in the disc a characteristic "signature": dark rings that look like tracks on an old vinyl. These young planets are an amazing opportunity to put to the test our planet formation theories. As an Ernest Rutherford fellow, I will use sophisticated computer codes to "weigh" these planets and study if our planet formation theories can explain their existence.

Another focus of my research is understanding how matter in discs spirals in and eventually falls onto the star, a process called accretion. We see this, but we do not know why it happens. But we do know that understanding this is an important piece of the puzzle to understand how planets form. In one of the hypotheses formulated to explain accretion, discs must become larger with time. As part of my research, I will use data from the ALMA telescope to understand whether this indeed happens.