"Magnetized Disk Winds and Planet Formation"

Abstract:

One of the central challenges to understanding planet formation is how planetary properties – their masses, orbital characteristics, bulk properties and atmospheric compositions – are connected to their formation in host protoplanetary disks (PPDs). Forming planets accrete pebbles, planetesimals, and gas over a wide range of chemical compositions as they migrate through their evolving PPDs. The basic mechanism that controls these processes is how angular momentum is removed from PPDs. Traditional models have assumed that turbulence is the main driver of such disk evolution; current ALMA observations have now largely ruled this out. Instead, powerful MHD simulations and a wide range of ALMA and JWST observations confirm that MHD disk winds likely play the dominant role. In this talk, I will briefly discuss relevant observational and theoretical advances and their consequences for a new paradigm for planet formation based on magnetized disk wind (MDW) transport of angular momentum. I will then focus on several recent advances in my group including the effects of MDWs on dust transport and evolution in PPDs, ring formation, planetary populations that result from disk-wind driven disk evolution, and our new planetary interior structure models that we apply to compute the mass-radius relation for our formed planets and compared with observations.