A General Modeling of Protoplanetary Disks in Chameleon II and Taurus

Jamar Kittling
Jamar Kittling

Jamar is a member of the class of 2024 from San Francisco, California, previously attending Archbishop Riordan High School. His prospective majors are Physics and Astronomy. Along with his planned majors, he is also academically interested in philosophy and religion. His extracurricular hobbies include attending WesAstro, writing, playing music, and playing video games. He hopes to pursue graduate studies in either Physics or Astronomy after Wesleyan.

Abstract: Protoplanetary disks are disks of gas and dust that surround newly-formed stars. The structure and evolution of these objects determine how planet formation proceeds; studying how protoplanetary disks vary with age, structure, and region will provide us with clues to the origin and properties of planets around other stars and within our own solar system. The goal of our research was to uniformly model protoplanetary disks in the star-forming regions Chameleon II and Taurus in order to complete a database of disk structure that can be used to study planet formation across star-forming regions. The disks in Chameleon II (n=24) and Taurus (n=49) were imaged using observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) at ≈1.33 mm wavelength and the Submillimeter Array (SMA) at .869 mm, respectively, with angular resolution for most disks being approximately .35 arcseconds.  An affine invariant  Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm was used to fit the disks for 8 parameters: flux, characteristic radius, inclination, position angle, and offset position (right ascension and declination), as well as the slope of a power law (gamma1) and exponential tail (gamma2) which describe the flux as a function of radius in the inner and outer disk, respectively. This database will be used to study the conditions that influence planet formation to help us better understand the evolution of planetary systems.

Video:

Jamar Kittling (Astronomy)
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