Growing Worlds
An explosion of exoplanet discoveries has swept through astronomy in the last 30 years. Prior to 1989, humanity only knew of the planets in our own Solar System, but today the number of confirmed extrasolar planets is nearing 5,000 thanks to space telescopes like Kepler and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) scanning the stars for other worlds. The more exoplanets that are found, the greater the diversity of worlds we know about – from worlds meeting their ends by tumbling into stars, to infant planets just beginning to form.
The study of these young planets and the circumstellar discs of dust and gas from which they emerge has blossomed as a field in recent years. Observatories such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have allowed astronomers such as Jaehan Bae from the University of Florida to examine the discs in more detail than ever before.
“I’m interested in how planets form – not just extrasolar planets, but those in our Solar System too,” says Bae. “Historically,
