Project description
JWST spectra to examine rocky planets formation
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for the first time peers into the formation environments of rocky planets around T Tauri (TT) and very low mass stars (VLMS). It found the gas to be oxygen-rich in TT disks and carbon-rich in VLMS disks. The ERC-funded DISKS-ROCK project will use this JWST data to decipher the building blocks of rocky planets. The results will place our own Earth in the larger galactic context and provide crucial input for future missions in search of life. To accomplish this, the project will develop a novel two-dimensional modelling framework including physical, chemical and dynamical processes to constrain disk evolution during the early build-up phase of rocky planets using data from statistically relevant disk samples.
Objective
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) now peers for the first time into the rocky planet birth environments around Solar-type (T Tauri - TT) and Very Low Mass stars (VLMS) with ages of 1-4 Myr. The data shows that disk gas around TT stars is oxygen-rich, while it is carbon-rich around VLMS; yet they formed inside the same molecular cloud. VLMS are the most abundant stars in the galaxy, hosting most rocky exoplanets known to date, making them key targets to search for life. Yet today, it is paramount that we understand what causes this apparent difference, and the implications for the composition of forming planets and their evolution.
JWST mid-infrared spectra contain a forest of molecular emissions which carries the complete information (gas and solids) about the planet forming environment in a complex way. The overarching aim of DISKS-ROCK is to thus characterize the current planet birth environments across stellar mass and to constrain disk evolution during the early build-up phase of rocky planets.
I will draw from my expertise in thermo-chemical disk modeling, chemistry and mid-infrared spectroscopy to develop a novel, consistent and comprehensive 2D modeling framework to decipher the evolution that led to the apparent differences in gas composition between TT and VLMS. The key to fully exploit JWST data lies in quantifying how disk substructure formation, transport processes from the outer disk, and gas and dust chemical interaction shape the molecular emission spectra of the inner disks.
DISKS-ROCK will characterize the current birth environment of planets and constrain disk evolution during the early build-up phase of rocky planets for a statistically relevant sample of ~50 disks. This will establish whether planets around VLMS and TT stars assemble from the same material and follow similar evolution paths. The results of DISKS-ROCK will put our own Earth into the larger galactic context and provide crucial input to future missions searching for life.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences physical sciences astronomy observational astronomy
- natural sciences physical sciences optics spectroscopy
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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9712CP Groningen
Netherlands
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