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Circumstellar disks and star/planet formation

25 articles

Alan P. Boss

Alan P. Boss, also known as Alan Boss, is an American astrophysical theorist at Carnegie who revived the gravitational instability hypothesis of giant planet formation.

Alastair G. W. Cameron

Alastair G. W. Cameron (1925–2005) was a Canadian-born astrophysicist and planetary scientist, a founder of nuclear astrophysics and an independent developer of the giant-impact model of the Moon's formation.

Anjali Tripathi

Anjali Tripathi is an American astrophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who studies planet formation in protoplanetary disks and atmospheric escape, and served as a White House Fellow.

Anneila Sargent

Anneila Sargent is a Scottish-born American astronomer at Caltech known for millimeter-wave and infrared studies of star and planet formation, and led the Owens Valley Radio Observatory from 1998 to 2007.

Chushiro Hayashi

Chushiro Hayashi (林忠四郎) was a Japanese theoretical astrophysicist and Kyoto University professor known for the Hayashi track of pre-main-sequence stellar evolution and the Kyoto model of solar-system formation.

Daniel J. Price

Daniel J. Price, also known as Daniel Price, is an Australian computational astrophysicist and professor at Monash University in Melbourne, known for the PHANTOM and SPLASH codes.

David J. Wilner

David J. Wilner is a Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, at Harvard, who studies protoplanetary disks and planet formation using ALMA and the Submillimeter Array.

Douglas Lin

Douglas N. C. Lin (林潮), born 1949, is a UC Santa Cruz theoretical astrophysicist who co-developed the theory of planetary migration and won the 2015 Bruce Gold Medal.

Edwin A. Bergin

Edwin A. Bergin, known as Ted Bergin, is an American astronomer and astrochemist at the University of Michigan who studies the chemistry of planet formation.

Forest Ray Moulton

Forest Ray Moulton (1872–1952) was an American theoretical astronomer and celestial mechanician who co-developed the planetesimal hypothesis of the solar system's origin with geologist Thomas Chamberlin.

Geoffrey A. Blake

Geoffrey A. Blake is an astronomer and chemist at Caltech who studies molecules in star and planet formation, co-authoring the 2011 discovery of ocean-like water in comet Hartley 2.

George Herbig

George Herbig (1920–2013) was an American astronomer, regarded as the father of star-formation studies, who spent over seventy years studying how stars are born at Lick Observatory and in Hawaii.

George Wetherill

George Wetherill (1925–2006) was an American physicist and planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institution whose simulations of planet formation earned him the title father of Earth-formation models.

J.‐F. Donati

Jean-François Donati is a French astrophysicist and CNRS research director at IRAP in Toulouse, known for mapping stellar magnetic fields and leading the ESPaDOnS and SPIRou instruments.

Jeffrey N. Cuzzi

Jeffrey N. Cuzzi is an American planetary scientist who spent 1978 to 2023 at NASA's Ames Research Center studying Saturn's rings and the formation of chondrules and planetesimals.

Jonathan P. Williams

Jonathan P. Williams is an astronomer and professor at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa, known for submillimeter surveys of planet-forming disks around nearby young stars.

Lee Hartmann

Lee Hartmann is an American astronomer at the University of Michigan who studies star and planet formation, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2024.

Luis F. Rodríguez

Luis F. Rodríguez, also known as Luis Felipe Rodríguez, is a Mexican radio astronomer at UNAM who discovered the first microquasars in the Milky Way.

Peter Goldreich

Peter Goldreich, born 1939 in New York City, is an American theoretical astrophysicist and planetary scientist, emeritus at Caltech, known for work on planetary rings and pulsars.

Robin M. Canup

Robin M. Canup is an American planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder known for simulations showing a single Mars-sized giant impact could have formed the Moon.

Satoshi Yamamoto

Satoshi Yamamoto (山本 智, born 1957) is a Japanese observational astrophysicist and astrochemist at the University of Tokyo, known for identifying warm carbon-chain chemistry around protostars.

Shigeru Ida

Shigeru Ida (井田茂) is a Japanese planetary scientist known for theoretical work on planet formation, from the Moon's origin to exoplanet populations, and a former president of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Th. Henning

Thomas Kai Henning is an astrophysicist known for research on cosmic dust, protoplanetary disks, and planet formation, and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.

William J. Welch

William John (Jack) Welch (1934–2024) was an American radio astronomer and electrical engineer at UC Berkeley who built the first millimeter-wave interferometer and co-made the first detections of interstellar ammonia and water.

William Ward (planetary scientist)

William Roger Ward (1944–2018) was an American theoretical planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and SwRI, known for founding modern planet-migration theory and winning the 2011 Kuiper Prize.