In hopes of seeding ideas for joint UCLA-JPL projects, I will briefly
describe a half-dozen topics showing the capabilities at JPL for
modeling planet-forming environments in protostellar disks. The
common thread is our desire to translate the flood of data from
Spitzer, Herschel, SOFIA, ALMA, JWST and other telescopes into an
understanding of the origins of the observed population of planetary
systems. Specifically I’ll give a taste of our work on (1) young
planets perturbing their surroundings in ways that might soon be
observed, (2) delivering ices to planets massive enough to open a gap
in the circumstellar disk, (3) using molecular line emission to probe
turbulence in the disk atmosphere, (4) infrared variability as a gauge
of the disk magnetic activity, (5) the origins of Jupiter’s moons in a
circumplanetary disk, and/or (6) water abundances near the protosolar
disk’s snow line, in the face of destruction by stellar ultraviolet
photons.
Institute for Planets and Exoplanets
