HYBRID – General Meeting – June 2022

TAAA’s next General Member Meeting will be held on Friday, June 3, 2022 at 6:30 P.M. This will be a hybrid meeting (both in person and online). TAAA members will receive a Zoom link should they wish to attend remotely. The public may attend in person or online through our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/TucsonAstronomy. (This being our first hybrid meeting, please be patient as we work out any technical kinks!)

6:30 pm – Main Presentation

TITLE:  Imaging Giant Planets Forming Around Young Stars 

PRESENTATION:  Giant planets form within the first few million years of a system’s lifetime. After formation, these massive planets interact with their birth disks and gravitationally sculpt the environment of subsequent planet formation. Recent technical advances have enabled observations of the first few giant planets while they’re still forming and interacting with their parent disks. These planets induce large-scale structural changes in the disks alongside their on-going formation. And Dr. Kevin Wagner’s talk will highlight the first images of gas giant forming planetary systems. It will cover how these images are produced, what goes into their interpretation, and what they teach us about the formation of systems with giant planets (including our own solar system). 

BIO:  Dr. Kevin Wagner is a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. After growing up in Kentucky and Ohio, Dr. Wagner studied at the University of Cincinnati before receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on directly detecting and studying planets around nearby stars, such as Alpha Centauri, with a specific focus on finding and characterizing potentially life-supporting planets and understanding how planetary systems form and evolve.