Stellar-MADE project
Elisa Castro
Summary of my career
In 2020, during the final years of my licenciatura at the Faculty of Sciences (Uruguay), I took an optional intensive course on planet formation, taught by Dr. Julia Venturini. This course introduced me to the mysteries of protoplanetary disks and how we still don’t know what mechanisms drive their evolution. This intrigued me a lot, so I chose to focus on them for both my licenciatura and master’s research projects.
The classical theory for the evolution of PPDs is that turbulent viscosity redistributes angular momentum, inducing particles in the inner disk to be accreted by the star while the outer disk is dispersed outwards. This is the alpha-disk model. During my licenciatura project, supervised by Dr. Venturini, I used an evolution code that implements the alpha-disk model to include an additional less studied process: magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) winds. This phenomenon arises from the presence of a magnetic field across the PPD, which causes gas particles to be ejected and angular momentum to be lost, thus inducing accretion into the central star. The characteristics of disk evolution when we consider this process differ significantly from the alpha-disk model.
During my master’s degree, under the supervision of Dr. Octavio M. Guilera, I improved the code used previously, performed population synthesis of gas disks looking for the parameters that best replicated observational trends (such as accretion rates and mean lifetimes) and coupled the dust evolution to compare evolved dust distributions with debris disks. At this stage I worked with Dr. Sebastián Bruzzone, using polarimetric images of debris disks to characterize them and compare them with the results of the simulations.
I also worked at the Physics Institute of the Faculty of Engineering, teaching undergraduate courses. I have participated since 2020 in preparing students for the Uruguayan and Latin American Olympiads of Astronomy and Astrophysics. This work led to the creation of a series of notes, compiled into an online book that I constantly update, aiming to provide students with a source of information suitable for their level.
Ongoing research
During my PhD, I will continue working on the subject of protoplanetary disks, this time focusing on those associated with binary stellar systems. Under the supervision of Dr. Nicolás Cuello, I will conduct simulations of disks in these systems to determine the conditions for planet formation.
Additionally, the PhD has an observational component, supervised by Dr. Philippe Delorme, which will involve searching for planets and disks around binaries. This is important because planets in binary systems are currently under-detected due to observational biases and the significant difficulty posed by having more than one star in the system (even one star is challenging enough!).
The (hopefully numerous) new detections of planets in binary systems will be compared with synthetic populations generated from the simulations.
Recent highlight
Coming soon!