Events

Date: 6 March 2026   Time: 14:30 - 15:30     

Location: Room 610, G. O. Jones, Mile End Campus

There is plenty of evidence now that planet formation begins very soon after the formation of the disc itself. At early stages, protostellar discs tend to be more massive and are therefore likely to be susceptible to the gravitational instability, which can play a key role in their evolution and in planet formation. As such, there is renewed interest from the planet formation community in exploring the role of the gravitational instability in building planets. So far, modelling has largely been restricted to simplistic approximations of cooling, and prescribed temperature profiles, while the alternative of employing ray-tracing radiative transfer adds considerable computational expense. I will present simulations that explore the parameter space for which discs are expected to be unstable using our new cooling approximation method. The results indicate that large-scale spiral structures could be uncommon and that the types of discs that may undergo fragmentation is somewhat different to previous predictions. I will then discuss the implications of these findings for observations of these discs and for our understanding of the early stages of planet formation.