Ithaca College

Please join us for a talk with Dr. Joel Kastner, Professor and Director, Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics, Rochester Institute of Technology:

Birthing Solar Systems in Our Back Yard: A Close Look at the Nearest Known Planet-forming Disks

Thousands of extrasolar planets ("exoplanets") have been discovered over the past two decades. Astronomers seeking to understand the astonishing variety of planetary masses and orbital separations that characterize these myriad exoplanet systems, as well as the earliest evolution of our own solar system, must carefully study exoplanet birthplaces: dusty, molecule-rich “protoplanetary” disks orbiting young stars. I describe recent advances in the study of protoplanetary disks using the recently commissioned Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio interferometer as well as the latest generation of adaptive optics (AO) cameras on the world’s largest (8-meter-class) optical/infrared telescopes. My talk will focus on ALMA and AO studies of the nearest-known disks; these young neighbors afford opportunities to image disk structures and chemistry on solar system size scales. 

Joel Kastner earned a BS in Physics at the University of Maryland (1981) and Masters and PhD degrees in Astronomy at the University of California Los Angeles in 1986. As a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he worked on a team developing the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. He has been on the faculty at the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is now the Director of the Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics at RIT.

Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2017
12:10 - 1:00 CNS 206B

Pizza and Refreshments will be available for $1.
Please bring your own cup.
Remember to Recycle, Reuse, Reduce.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact the department assistant at jackerman@ithaca.edu. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.