Planet- and Moon-Factory

ended

Understanding better planet- and moon-formation is a key to comprehend how planetary systems – including our own – came to be. To study these processes, we need computer simulations of their birth nests, the disks around the young stars (circumstellar disks) where planets are born; and disks around forming planets (circumplanetary disks) where moons assemble. Circumplanetary disks are located within the circumstellar disks and they were first detected observationally in June 2019, after twenty years of numerical simulations predicting their existence. Therefore, it is very timely to study their characteristics. Circumplanetary disks have three main roles. Firstly, the are channelling material to the forming planets, hence they regulate the formation timescale and the final planetary mass. Secondly, they are the birth-place for moons to grow. Thirdly, they surround and embed the forming planet, hence affect the observational appearance of forming planets. Developing state-of-the-art gas-dust thermo-hydrodynamical simulations, combining them with radiative transfer, N-body simulations, and for the first time with machine learning, offers a completely new window to reveal how planet- and moon-formation takes place. The three scientific projects of this proposal are: I. Understanding the thermo-hydrodynamical effects on planetary growth, on the formation timescale at different locations of the circumstellar disk, and hence the diversity of the final planetary masses. II. Observational predictions of forming planets from the simulations – which instrument can be used to detect them, what information can be gained from these observations, and what are the general characteristics of circumstellar disks determined with machine learning. III. Studying moon-formation in the circumplanetary disk, provide predictions of how the exomoon population looks like, and what fraction of exomoons is detectable with current and near-future instrumentation.