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Astronomy Colloquium
Photochemical Processing in Protoplanetary Disks: Insights from Our Solar System
Date: Thursday, March 30th
Time: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Place: 4421 Sterling Hall
Speaker: Fred Ciesla, University of Chicago
Abstract: Protoplanetary disks are sites of active chemistry, where materials inherited from a natal molecular cloud are transformed into the building blocks of planets. Astronomical observations of such disks have shown how important photon-driven chemistry is to understanding this transformation, because young stars emit copious amounts of UV photons which can drive chemical reactions and because the regions we are able to characterize are those where these photons are readily absorbed. However, planet formation occurs deep inside these protoplanetary disks, around the disk midplane, where energetic photons are expected to be largely absent. While mixing between these layers will occur, it remains unclear how much the products of photochemical reactions contribute to setting the compositions of the planets that ultimately form. In this talk, I will describe modeling we have done to investigate proposed photochemical signatures seen in primitive meteorites and what this implies about the role the chemical evolution that shaped planetary building blocks in our own solar nebula.
Host: Ke Zhang
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