Professor Birnstiel and his group work towards understanding the processes involved in the formation of planets. The group uses mainly computational tools to model and simulate the structure and evolution of circumstellar disks and the growth processes that lead from sub-micrometer sized dust particles all the way to terrestrial planets or giant planets.
Researchers at LMU, the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) have developed a new model to explain the formation of giant planets.
A team of astronomers, including physicists from LMU, has gained new insights into the process of planet formation.
The latest analysis of publications places seventeen LMU scientists and academics, including three phycicists, among the most successful in their chosen field.
The LMU astrophysicist has won the award for his modeling of dust traps in protoplanetary disks, solving a long-standing puzzle in planet formation.
Til Birnstiel was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2023, which provides the working group with research funding of around 2 million euros.
The ERC project EARLYBIRD aims to investigate how the formation stage of planet-forming disks imprint themselves onto the exoplanetary systems we can observe. The 5-year project revolves around the questions: How do structures form in young disks that can trigger the formation of planets? How do luminosity outbursts affect the formation of planetary building blocks and their composition? What imprints do these processes leave in the observable populations of protoplanetary disks and exoplanets?
Til Birnstiel ist member of a Large Programe of the SPHERE instrument at the VLT that observes planet-forming disks in high resolution scattered light. The project is led by Christian Ginski at the University of Galway, Ireland. More information can be found on the DESTINYS website.
Til Birnstiel was part of a Large Programm at the Atacama Large millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA), led by colleagues from Europe, the United States and Chile. The observations enabled us to show that ring-shaped substurctures and sometimes asymmetries are ubiquitous in planeten-building disks and that planets apparently form faster than previously thought possible.
Til Birnstiel was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2017, which supported the working group with research funding of around 1.5 million euros.
The ERC project DUSTPRINTS aimed to investigate the early phases of planet formation. When and where do the building blocks of planets form and what mechanisms cause the substructures in the planet-forming disk? Are they caused by planets or other disk processes?
It could be shown that planets are probably the cause behind most of the observed structures. It could also be demonstrated that the properties of the observed rings indicate that asteroids/comet-sized "planetesimals" are formed there.
In this project, 71 articles have been published that have already been cited more than 4700 times (as of 2023).
A lecture by Professor Birnstiel at the Deutsches Museum in Munich about the formation of planets.
1:22:55 | 11 Jan 2023
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