Searching for protoplanetary disks |
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The Orion star-forming region contains a large number of young, low mass stars
encircled by small dusty disks which are though to be proto-planetary disks
(and dubbed ProPlyDs; O'Dell et al. 1993).
Strantely, not many such disks have been detected outside
Orion. The question arises whether this is due to the fact that Orion is very close,
or whether something is special about Orion that allows the presence of
ProPlyDs.
Inspired by a talk by John Bally, that I heard at an astrobiology meeting, I enlisted the help of two experts in this field, Bob O'Dell and Bob Rubin and obtained HST/ACS time to survey a bunch of relatively-nearby HII regions. I later enlisted a recent Yale physics graduate, Pamela Gelfond, with whose help we finally published in De Marco et al. 2006. Our findings showed that ProPlyDs are indeed very rare outside of Orion possibly due to their transient nature as well as the conditins needed to observe them. We also studied Bok globules lending evidence to the fact that they might be star-forming. |
Last Update: 11 June 2008