Origins Institute Lecture Series with Thomas K. Henning

Presented on: Monday, November 30th at 1:00 PM EST

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Astronomers have discovered more than 4.500 exoplanets with radial velocity and transit techniques. Most of these planets orbit Gyr-old mature stars, making the reconstruction of their formation pathways a challenging task. Our hunt for young planets that are still located in their parental circumstellar disks has finally been successful. Adaptive optics led to succeeding this goal by directly imaging young planets with 10m-class telescopes. The talk will present the discovery of the PDS 70 planetary system and its implications for planet formation theories. The planet-forming disk around the central star has been characterized by long-wavelength observations, demonstrating the importance of multi-wavelength studies in astronomy.

To gain some background knowledge in advance of this talk, please watch Dr. Henning in this video link -
https://lt.org/publication/how-do-planetary-systems-develop-out-disk-young-stars

Thomas K. Henning is the Director, Planet and Star Formation Department at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. Henning is working on understanding how stars and planets form. He is hunting for exoplanets with a variety of methods from radial velocity searches to transit observations and direct imaging. Henning is combining infrared observations at high spatial resolution with large-scale numerical simulations and dedicated laboratory experiments. He is leading the MPIA Planet and Star Formation Department and is a Professor at the University of Heidelberg and Jena.

Henning established the Heidelberg Origins of Life Initiative (HIFOL) and is a Co-I of major instrumentation projects such as MIRI for the James Webb Space Telescope.