Dusting for the Fingerprints of Exoplanets — Seba Perez (Universidad de Santiago de Chile)

If you walk into a room and see footprints on the floor, even if no one is there, you know someone has passed through. Planet formation observations work in a similar way. Young planets are hidden within the gas and dust of circumstellar disks, often invisible to direct observation. Instead, we search for the perturbations they leave behind: rings carved in dust, spirals launched through gas, vortices trapping particles, and not so subtle departures from Keplerian motion. In this talk, I will discuss the physics that allows planets to grow from microscopic grains to giant worlds, and show how modern facilities such as ALMA and VLT, let us “dust for fingerprints” in planet-forming disks and allow us to move from detecting mature exoplanets to catching planets at birth. If time permits, I will discuss recent efforts to apply machine learning techniques to the study of planet formation.

Horarios: 14 Apr 2026

Publicado por: Gijs Mulders