10 years of ALMA: transforming our understanding of planet formation in circumstellar disks
Presented by: Dr. Brenda Matthews
RASC Calgary
Thursday March 17, 2022 @ 7:30 pm MDT ( 9:30 pm EDT)
As ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array) reaches 10 years of operations, it has clearly delivered on its key science goal to image planet-forming disks in nearby star-forming regions. High resolution imaging of entire disk populations have now been made, and these striking images have revealed a diversity in disk structures. These diversities have led to a picture linking these young disks and their more evolved counterparts, called debris disks, to the exoplanet population. I will share many of these breathtaking ALMA images and describe the hypothesis of a recent paper regarding how the most structured disks drive massive planet populations and significant belts of comets and asteroids around stars.
Bio:
Dr. Brenda Matthews has been with the NRC since 2004, when she joined the organization as a Plaskett Fellow. She completed her PhD in 2001 at McMaster University and was a BIMA Fellow in the Radio Astronomy Lab at UC Berkeley until moving to Victoria. Since 2019, she has been the Millimetre Astronomy Group Lead and, as such coordinates the MAG support for the ALMA telescope as part of the North American ALMA Science Center. She is an expert in mm and submm astronomy, polarization of star-forming regions and interferometry. Since 2002, much of her research has focussed on debris disks, circumstellar disks around main sequence stars, produced via collisions of comets and asteroids, and has authored two reviews on debris disks. She was the PI of a key program on the Herschel Space Observatory, is a member of the disks team of the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey and is a member of an Early Release Science team targeting exoplanets and disks with JWST. Dr. Matthews was also a member of the Canadian Astronomical Society’s 2020 Long Range Plan panel and is a long-standing member of the Science Advisory Committee for the Next Generation Very Large Array (ngVLA)