Stellar-MADE project
Pedro Poblete
Summary of my career
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the université Grenoble Alpes and part of the Stellar-MADE project at IPAG/CNRS (France). My academic record started in Chile at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where I obtained my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Astrophysics in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Afterward, I entered the Ph.D. program in astrophysics at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena (Germany), which was completed in 2023. In my whole career, I have studied the field of planetary formation; in Chile, I learned about the Protoplanetary Discs by doing computational simulations and modeling, and in Germany, I did my thesis on Debris Disc dynamics. These topics allowed me to develop skills in data analysis and the management of hydrodynamical and N-body simulations.
The planetary formation process begins with the star formation. When the molecular gas cloud collapses, a disc surrounding the proto-star is also formed. That disc is the so-called protoplanetary disc, which is a mixture of solid and gaseous material, the latter being dominant. When the gas vanishes, the remains are mainly solids: dust, planetesimals, and planets. The resulting disc is now called the Debris Disc.
I led a team to explore the nature of the protoplanetary discs AB Aurigae and HD 169142 (see Poblete et al. 2020, 2022 respectively). I employed the SPH code PHANTOM to reproduce the disc features by adding a stellar binary. Finally, those models were tested against their respective ALMA observations via millimetre wavelength synthetic images, CO maps, and kinematic maps created by MCFOST. The studies of both systems were direct sequels to my first work that explored the effect of inclined stellar binaries on the disc’s morphology through the same hydrodynamic code (Poblete, Cuello & Cuadra 2019).
My doctoral thesis explored the impact of inclined planets on self-gravitating discs. The novel aspect was to study the impact of the disc’s self-gravity. Past works had only considered the test particle approximation or just the feedback between the disc and the planet. They assumed that self-gravity does not matter, but actually, it does and strongly affects the interpretation of observations. I employed the N-body integrator REBOUND to perform my set of simulations along with analytical models to approach the problem. The results show the importance of considering the self-gravity for the cohesion of the disc against a perturbing planet (Poblete et al. 2023).
Ongoing research
As a member of the Stellar-MADE team, I work on studying Protoplanetary Discs in multiple stellar systems, particularly in developing models employing the novel hybrid numerical tool PHANTOM-MCFOST. Besides, I work in dust dynamics planetary architecture, and projects related to the debris disc phase.
Recent highlight
My latest article was on Self-gravity of debris discs can strongly change the outcomes of interactions with inclined planets.