Star Talk: Wednesday, March 1st

How to Build a Planet: Assembling Planets in Stellar Sandboxes🪐
Join us with Dr. Yayaati Chachan at 6:00pm on Wednesday, 1st March for our next Star Talk!✨

📍AB107 (Cody hall) – 50 St. George Street

Talk Abstract: Nearly every star has a planet orbiting around it. The formation of planets is therefore a robust outcome of star formation. Yet, our understanding of this process is still fairly primitive. In this talk, Dr. Chachan will review basic ideas underlying theories of planet formation and how they are constantly challenged by cutting-edge observations of planets in and beyond our solar system. He will describe what these observations of planets teach us about their formation. This discussion will range from the interiors of Jupiter & Saturn to the atmospheres of ultra-hot Jupiters, a rare class of planets that have iron and silicon as gases in their atmospheres.

Speaker Bio: Yayaati Chachan is a CITA National and Trottier Space Institute fellow at McGill University. He has a broad interest in planetary atmospheres, planet formation, and protoplanetary discs and he studies these areas using observational, analytical, and numerical methods. He obtained a B.A. in physics and M.Sci. in astrophysics at the University of Cambridge followed by a Ph.D. in planetary science at Caltech.