11/dez/20 – Planet formation in protoplanetary discs (Dr. Bertram Bitsch, MPIA)

When a star is born, a protoplanetary discs, consisting of dust grains and gas, forms around it. Inside this disc, the dust grains can start to grow and form larger and larger objects until finally planetesimals – objects of about 100km in size – are formed. These planetesimals can then grow by further accreting other planetesimals or pebbles – particles of mm to cm in size. These planetary embryos can then finally start to accrete gas once they reach several Earth masses and transition into a gas giant. This growth process covers several orders of magnitude in size and many orders of magnitude in mass. Naturally, there are many unknowns in this process.

In this talk, I will focus on the importance of the disc structure for planet formation. While recent disc observations with ALMA give amazing insights into the structure of the outer disc, the disc structure in the inner regions is much harder to probe. We therefore have to rely on modeling the inner disc structure in order to understand the planet formation process in the inner few AU. I will present results of recent radiation hydrodynamical simulations including grain growth that study the detailed disc structure in the inner few AU and their connection to the close-in super-Earth population.