Speaker
Sijme-Jan Paardekooper
Description
Planets form in discs of gas and dust around young stars. Within these discs, solid particles have to grow 12 orders of magnitude to form terrestrial planets. This process is never going to be 100 percent efficient at all times, so that there will always be a distribution of sizes in solids. The dynamics of a mixture of dust sizes, coupled to the gas through friction, can be complex and non-intuitive. In some cases, having a size distribution can seriously hinder planet formation, but on the other hand this offers exciting links to observations of Solar system objects.
