Planet Formation

is believed to take place in the disks of gas and dust around forming stars. The earliest stages of that process occurs while the gas is moving through the disk and falling onto the star. This is known as accretion, and while we can observe it occurring, we do not have good theoretical insight into what is causing it. The most promising agent of accretion is turbulence driven by the magnetorotational instability. This turbulence is critical in understanding the dynamics of the gas and dust, the latter of which creates the seeds for planet formation. We are using the parallel computing facility at AMNH to make detailed turbulence models under a variety of conditions that might occur in protoplanetary disks. Having a medium sized facility--larger than a standard workstation but smaller than the largest supercomputers--allows us to make many, many small scale models. This in turn allows us to explore the parameter space before investing significant amounts of time on the largest supercomputing facilities.

-Jeff Oishi