PAS mtg.

Dear Friends:

        Just another reminder of tonight's PAS mtg. Please let me know if
you plan to come to Chef Chu's at El Camino Real and San Antonio Rd.
in Los Altos for dinner with the speaker starting at 6PM.

Thanks,

Ken L.

Planet Embryos in Vortex Wombs:
The Origin of Planetary Systems

by Ken Lum

The next PAS General Meeting will be this Friday, May 9 at 7:30PM in
our venue in Rm. 5015 in Bldg. 5000 near Parking Lot #5 at Foothill
Community College in Los Altos Hills. Our speaker will be Dr. Joseph
Barranco of San Francisco State University who will be speaking on
"Planet Embryos in Vortex Wombs: The Origin of Planetary Systems".
The past 15 years have witnessed the discovery of planets in the most
unexpected of places: terrestrial-size planets around such "dead"
stars as pulsars (Wolszczan 1991), gas giant planets that orbit their
parent stars much closer than Mercury does our Sun (Mayor & Queloz
1995), and now even planets around "failed" stars known as brown
dwarfs (Chauvin et al. 2005). Besides these unusual systems,
astronomers have now discovered more than 200 planets around other
Sun-like stars (Marcy et al. 2006, Fischer et al. 2006), and the
search continues as we try to find a system that looks just like our
own. Clearly, the mechanisms of planet formation are far more robust
and varied than we had first imagined. These new discoveries have
sparked a Renaissance in planet formation theory, an understanding of
which is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on mechanics (both
solid & fluid), thermodynamics, electromagnetism, astrophysics, and
geophysics. Dr. Barranco will present recent computational
simulations of the settling of dust sub-layers in the protoplanetary
disks of gas & dust out of which planets must form. Alternative
mechanisms will also be described for concentrating dust, including
3D vortices ("giant hurricanes") in protoplanetary disks, which trap
dust grains in the "eyes" of such storms.

        Dr. Barranco attended Harvard University where he earned a B.A. in
Physics, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Magna Cum Laude, in 1993. His
undergraduate thesis, "Velocity Coherent Structure in the Dense Cores
of Dark Molecular Clouds," was done under the guidance of Professor
Alyssa A. Goodman. He earned his Ph.D. in Astrophysics in 2004. His
Ph.D. thesis, "Theory and Numerical Simulation of Three-Dimensional
Vortices in Protoplanetary Disks," was done under the guidance of
Professor Philip S. Marcus in the Berkeley Computational Fluid
Dynamics Lab. In 2006, his thesis won the Nicholas Metropolis Prize
for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Computational Physics from the
American Physical Society. He also received a National Science
Foundation Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship, which
was split between the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the
University of California, Santa Barbara and the Institute for Theory
& Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He
joined the Department of Physics & Astronomy at San Francisco State
University in the summer of 2007.

        Fortuitously, as my record of having our guest speakers track recent
articles in the popular literature continues, the latest May issue of
Scientific American has an article on the mechanisms of planet
formation by Douglas C. N. Lin of UC Santa Cruz titled "The Genesis
of Planets" if you want to prepare for this talk. Someday, we will
also hear from him on this topic as well.

        Don't forget that parking is $2.00!

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