Sophia
Lanava
Sophia Lanava, an astrophysics major from Bryn Mawr College, will join Alycia Weinberger to study Planet Formation in Dusty Disks.
Studying Planet Formation in Dusty Disks
In this project, Sophia will explore the wonders of unraveling the processes that drive planet formation by looking at the disks of comets left over from exoplanetary formation.
The composition of dust changes the amount of starlight that gets scattered and emitted by cometary dust. We can make images of disks around other stars at multiple wavelengths and model them to predict what other observations would best tell us their composition. The intern student will be mentored in Python programming, the careful assessment of uncertainties in telescopic observations, and the complementary use of observations together with modeling.
