My name is Felipe Alarcón Peña.
I’m a Chilean Dr. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Michigan. I try to understand the chemistry in planet-forming disks and to describe the birth environments of protoplanets. My work is mostly based in hydrodynamics and thermochemical simulations of disks along with observations of them in the millimetric and infrared wavelengths.
Protoplanetary disks are thought to be the birth places of planets and as such they are very important at constraining their compositions, their origins and whether or not they could be Earth-like or host life as we know it.
Images from the dust millimetric particles such as the DSHARP survey (Andrews et al. 2018) show that these disks are very rich in dust substructures, which could be interpreted as potential signpots of ongoing planet formation. Recent images from the MAPS Collaboration (Öberg et al. 2021) show line emission from important gas tracers in five of these disks, leading to believe that they have even richer and more complex structuress across different molecular species, making them interesting objects to study.