My name is Felipe Alarcón Peña.
I’m a Chilean Ph.D candidate at the University of Michigan trying to understand the chemistry in planet-forming disks. My work is mostly based in hydrodynamics and thermochemical simulations of disks along with observations of them in the millimetric wavelenghts.
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.