CAREER: Unveiling the icy landscape of planet formation

The building blocks of new planets consist of the gas, ice, and dust present within the protoplanetary disks around young stars. Our understanding of the distribution, composition, and evolution of the gas and dust components has improved dramatically in recent years, but our understanding of the ices remains extremely limited. This represents a major obstacle to the modern study of planet formation due to the fundamental importance of ices in determining the outcomes of planet formation. A researcher at the University of California-Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) will carry out a multifaceted project that includes complementary laboratory, computational (AI/ML), and observing efforts to detail the composition and origin of ices within protoplanetary disks, which is a key step towards interpreting the observed exoplanet population. This project will support a graduate student, who will be involved with all aspects of the research, and it includes undergraduate course development at UC-Berkeley that will enhance students’ computer programing skills. Undergraduate student research opportunities will be provided through a paid summer internship that will be broadly advertised, including to students who may not have had a rigorous science education to date. The project also includes the development of a new public outreach program focused on planetary habitability that will be presented at a local planetarium and other planetariums. Ices play a critical role in regulating the physics and chemistry of planet formation. This program will reveal the spatially varying composition of icy building blocks that are available to forming planets, a key step towards interpreting the observed exoplanet population. The project has four objectives to reach this goal: 1) conduct lab experiments to determine volatile sublimation behavior and temperature-dependent compositions of astrophysically realistic ices; 2) develop machine learning (ML) models to emulate spectral energy distributions and continuum images of edge-on protoplanetary disks; 3) use the developed ML framework in conjunction with Bayesian inference techniques to determine the physical structure and dust properties for the known sample of edge-on disks; and 4) produce synthetic infrared ice absorption spectra for the known edge-on disk population and compare them with available observed spectra of the disks. The research will shed new light on the origin of icy planet-forming material, fill crucial knowledge gaps in our understanding of fundamental microphysical processes within astrophysical ices, and provide homogeneous constraints on the dust properties and distributions within protoplanetary disks. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2544445 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT,01002930DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT,01003031DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Jennifer Bergner | Institution: University of California-Berkeley, BERKELEY, CA | Award Amount: $533,998 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2544445 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2544445.html