Séminaire Doctorants / Seminar PhD students |
| « The Beta Pictoris system: a unique laboratory of planetary formation » |
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Théo Vrignaud |
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Beta Pictoris is a young (20 Myr) bright (V = 3.86) A5V star located in the Pictor constellation. It is famous for harbouring one of the most iconic exoplanetary systems known to date, if not the most. Sticking features of this system include an extended debris disc, spanning hundreds of astronomical units around the star and detected in infrared imagery, two massive planets (ß pic b and c) comparable to Jupiter and Saturn in the solar system, and an extreme number of comets (the so-called exocomets) that evaporate on close approach to the star. All these features, combined with the proximity of the system (19 pc) and the favourable orientation of the disc (seen edge-on), make ß pic a unique laboratory to study the last stages of planetary formation.
In this talk, I will retrace the major discoveries link to the ß pic system, back from the very first images of the disc (Smith & Terrile 1984) to recent advances with the JWST. I will then focus on the exocomets, the main topic of my PhD. I will present my work to characterise the physical and chemical properties of these objects (Vrignaud et al. 2024, Vrignaud & Lecavelier 2024), and the remaining challenges to assess the role played by exocomets in the evolution of the ß pic planetary system as a whole. |
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vendredi 11 octobre 2024 - 16:00 Salle Planck, Institut d'Astrophysique |
| Page web du Séminaire / Seminar's webpage |