Podcaster: Rob Sparks and Dr. Joan Najita
Title: Planet Formation Around Nearby Stars
Organization: NOAO
Links: www.noao.edu ; @NOAONorth; http://www.lsst.org/
Description: In a recently published paper, NOAO astronomer Joan Najita was part of a team that has shown evidence for a planet forming in the disk around a young star. The results provide perhaps the first evidence that planets are surrounded by a circumplanetary disk at birth. A planet forming in the disk has cleared the disk within 13AU of the star, a distance comparable to that of Saturn from the sun. As gas and dust flows from the circumstellar disk to the planet, this material surrounds the planet as a circumplanetary disk. In this podcast, Dr. Najita discusses her recent research.
Bio: Rob Sparks is a science education specialist in the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) group at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and works on the Galileoscope project (www.galileoscope.org), providing design, dissemination and professional development. He blogs at halfastro.wordpress.com.
Dr. Joan Najita studies star and planet formation at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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