How Do Planets Form

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 30th January 2025 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Meeting Room

Planet formation theories have long been inspired only by our solar system. However, the discovery of planets around other stars - the so called exoplanets - have challenged our understanding of planet formation. This is caused by the fact that many systems host types of planets we do not have in our solar system: the so-called super-Earths (planets of a few times the mass of the Earth orbiting closer than Mercury in our solar system) and hot Jupiter's (Jupiter mass planets orbiting their host star in just a few days). The current planet formation models must explain all these different types of planets. In this talk, we will review the current status of the exoplanet population and how we can explain their origins. We will then also make a connection between the exo-planet formation models and our current understanding of the solar system formation.

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Speaker: Bertram Bitsch

Prof. Bitsch, from University College Cork, Ireland, obtained his PhD from Tubingen University in 2011 working on 3D radiation hydrodynamical simulations of planet-disc interactions and continued as a post-doc at the Nice Observatory in France, working on simulations of protoplanetary disc structures.  Research Group Leader at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, where he and his team studied how planets can form in different disc environments through hydrodynamical and N-body simulations. At UCC Dr. Bitsch will continue to work on planet formation simulations.