Planet formation and exoplanets
According to the new IAU definition of the word "Planet", a planet is a spherical body in orbit around the Sun or another star, and it must also have cleaned its orbit from any bodies of large mass. This new definition has brought down the number of planets in the solar system to 8, Pluto is not longer a planet. In the last 15 years, astronomers have discovered more than 400 planet around other stars, and this makes the formation of planets one of the central aspects of astronomical research today.
When stars form, this process is usually accompanied by the formation of a disk around the star. Such a circumstellar disk is also a protoplanetary disk, because it is assumed that planets are forming there. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam are involved in observations of protoplanetary disks, where they discover changes in the chemical composition and size of grains that are witness to the planet formation process. API astronomers also model protoplanetary disks and the processes in disks that lead to planet formation. From these models, radiative transfer calculations predict the emission of radiation and images of such disks. In comparison with observations, these models help to find out more about the processes happening there.
People at The Institute are working on the following topics:
 Dust |
 Exoplanets |
 Protoplanetary disks |