We live in the era when planets around stars other than our Sun, i.e. exo-planets, have been detected in large numbers, and yet one of the biggest question in science, to understand when and how they form, is still open. This question is key to shed light on the origin of our own planet, and to understand where other planets like our own formed, to further comprehend whether we are a unique case in the Universe or not. The answer to this question is strongly intertwined with a deep knowledge of the morphology of protoplanetary disks, the birthplace of planets, and of the physical processes shaping these morphologies.
Protoplanetary disks made of gas and dust are routinely detected around young stellar objects and they are being extensively studied in nearby (distance ca. 100 – 400 pc) star-forming regions. We have studied their properties, such as mass, size, and how the mass is distributed within the disk, key to determine what kind of planets would form. Each of these properties is regulated by several processes affecting the evolution of the disk, divided into internal processes, such as the accretion of material from the disk onto the central star or the ejection of material through winds, and external processes, such as external photoevaporation and dynamical interactions.
In the last decade new astonishing images of disks have been obtained especially using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and near-infrared high spatial resolution instruments, e.g. SPHERE on the Very Large Telescope (VLT). These images are causing a shift of paradigm: protoplanetary disks are not smooth, rather highly structured. Are these structures the signposts of planets? What other mechanisms can give origin to these structures? These questions are key to understand planet formation, yet they are still matter of debate.
More open questions arise when one considers that the impact of the environment dramatically increases in more distant (more than 400 – 1000 pc) and more massive star-forming regions, environments that best resemble the typical star-forming regions of when the currently known exo-planet hosting stars formed ca. 4–10 Gyrs ago. The external processes acting in these regions reduce the typical sizes of disks, strongly impacting the possibility of structures to form, and possibly modifying what kind of planetary systems can form in them. However, how exactly these processes impact the disks and the subsequent formation of planets is definitely not understood.
The goal of this program is to explore the relations between disk structures and a number of disk processes able to explain the presence and morphology of these structures, including but not limited to the disk winds, binaries, or to the presence of planets. In turn, in this program these key relations will be used as basis to study the ability to form planets in disks located in more massive and more distant star-forming regions than studied to date, where most stars and planets form.
