Formation of Planetary Systems (Spring 2022)

(MPAGS module AS8)


Assessment

The assessment for this module requires students to submit a short essay reviewing a recent research paper in this field. You should explain the motivation behind the study, and place it in context within the field of planet formation. In addition to reviewing the methods and results you should also highlight particular strengths and/or weaknesses of the paper, and discuss its (potential) importance within the field.

Essays should be 1500-2000 words in length. You are free to choose any recent paper on any of the topics covered in the course, with only one caveat: students whose PhD work is primarily theoretical must review an observational or instrumentation paper, while students doing PhDs primarily on observational or instrumental topics must review a theoretical paper. A list of suggested papers is provided below. You are welcome to choose other papers if you wish, but in this case please consult me in advance (to ensure that the chosen paper is appropriate).

Essays should be submitted by email as PDF files. The deadline for submission is Monday 25th April 2022.


Suggested Papers

THEORY
Migration of Jupiter mass planets in discs with laminar accretion flows, Lega et al.
Determining dispersal mechanisms of protoplanetary disks using accretion and wind mass loss rates, Hasegawa et al.
Origins of Hot Jupiters from the Stellar Obliquity Distribution, Rice et al.
Migration traps as the root cause of the Kepler dichotomy, Zawadzki et al.
Observing planet-driven dust spirals with ALMA, Speedie et al.

OBSERVATION
The Rossiter-McLaughlin effect Revolutions: An ultra-short period planet and a warm mini-Neptune on perpendicular orbits, Bourrier et al.
A SPHERE survey of self-shadowed planet-forming disks, Garufi et al.
Probing inner and outer disk misalignments in transition disks, Bohn et al.
A novel way of measuring the gas disk mass of protoplanetary disks using N2H+ and C18O, Trapman et al.
Survey of Orion Disks with ALMA (SODA) I: Cloud-level demographics of 873 protoplanetary disks, van Terwisga et al.