UW Assistant Professor Hannah Jang-Condell leads a NASA research team that will explore the evolution of planet formation, modeling disks around young stars that are in the process of forming their planets.
NASA recently launched the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), a cross-discipline effort bringing together researchers from various space-related fields to search for habitable planets outside our solar system called exoplanets.
The space agency selected University of Wyoming’s own Hannah Jang-Condell, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, to lead a team whose focus will be planet formation.
Since the first discovery of an exoplanet 20 years ago, the Kepler Mission has confirmed 1,020 exoplanets and found 4,633 potential others. With the field growing quickly, NASA is aiming to find new directions for projects and research.
Q: Can you talk about your research?
Jang-Condell (HJ): My research is on how planets form. I’m interested in learning how we get planets forming around our own sun and star and other stars other than our sun. There’s a large diversity of planets. You see exoplanets that are as massive as Jupiter on really tight orbits. They’re so close that they whip around their star in three days. On those planets, a year is three days. There are also some planets that are really far off, that are even farther from their stars than Pluto is from our sun, so there’s a lot of diversity in terms of planets and exoplanets. I’m interested in how they form and how they get to have different properties.
Q: How do you do that?
HJ: A lot of my research is doing computational simulation. Planets form from a disk of gas around a young star. It’s stuff left over from the star formation process and so there’s this disk of material and that’s when giant planets have to form because there’s still gas around or else you don’t get a gas giant. I look at how forming planets interact with that disk and one of the goals is to interpret observations of these disks around young stars. They have features like gaps, spiral arms and clumps. I’m looking at how those structures relate to planet formation.
Q: How will NExSS help the study of exoplanets?
HJ: NASA is trying to gather a bunch of interdisciplinary scientists together. Traditionally with NASA, there’s been the astrophysics division and they do astrophysics. There’s been the planetary science division, which studies planets. They’re trying to get more interactions between those two sides because if you’re studying exoplanets, you need to understand astrophysics and the stars around which these other planets exist, but you also need to know about planet properties, which we can learn from the planets in our own solar system. The ultimate question is that of habitability. Can these other planets support life, do they have life, if they have life, could we detect it?
Q: What do you like about NExSS?
HJ: It’s a way for me to continue doing my research but also to explore other avenues of research that I maybe hadn’t thought about before by talking to these other people who are doing interesting science also, trying to find ways that we can work together to solve new and interesting problems with exoplanets.
