Post Everthing Update

Now that.... Everything is complete, let's talk about it.

The Galaxies and Cosmology presentation a few weeks ago went pretty well. On the subject of the Hubble Sequence and time evolution therein, it was. I got fairly good reviews (I will post the slides as soon as I can find the most up-to-date version, it's sitting silently somewhere on my netbook). 

Now, on to AstroFluids. For this, we had to choose a subject and write a paper / do a presentation. My subject was planetary migration.

For those of you who don't know, planetary migration explains how hot Jupiters can exist, for example, or how planets like Uranus and Neptune can come to be, so far from the sun. The issue lies in that the model behind planet formation has rocky planets forming close to their parent star, and gas planets farther out, past about 4AU, typically, for a Sun-like star. The planets are born from a protoplanetary disk, gas and dust orbiting the central star. Jupiter sized planets form farther out because there's more matter to accrete and form the planet from (ie, you're going in bigger circles around the star through the protoplanetary disk when you're far out, so you're going to impact more of it) and so far from the star, molecules like water and some organic compounds can condense (yielding more matter for the planet formation process) and gas is less energetic, so it can also be accreted onto the forming planet (forming the gassy envelopes of the gas giants).

This is all great, but when we look outside the solar system, most of the planets we find are super massive (Jupiter masses) and orbit their stars at distances 10 times less than that of Mercury, so they're whipping around their stars once every couple days. Not only is there not enough mass in the protoplanetary disk at this radius to form these planets, there's no way that the gas would be gravitationally bound to the planet rather than floating around diffusely due to such high temperatures so close to the star. So, the solution is the planets form far out, then move in. Why? You'll have to read my paper for that (link to be added as soon as my online storage updates itself). 

Today, I want to finish my last assignment, and perhaps brew some beer. I've also got to go buy a tree though, as unfortunately, I couldn't find any Festivus poles.