[Baps] [PLS] May 13: Kate Follette (Amherst College)

[Samantha Hasler]

Hi all,

Reminder that Kate Follette will be on campus next Tuesday to give the Planetary Lunch Seminar. Please sign up to meet with her here<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1opusztAuro4l7e9mRvz29QDNd5UeRgibB-Q5zCPzlSU/edit?usp=sharing>!

Best,
Sammy, on behalf of the PLS Organizing Committee
________________________________
From: Samantha Hasler <shasler at mit.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2025 11:49 AM
To: planetary <planetary at mit.edu>; mitexoplanets <mitexoplanets at mit.edu>; exoplanetsgroup <exoplanetsgroup at mit.edu>; exoplanets <exoplanets at cfa.harvard.edu>
Cc: Kate Follette <kfollette at amherst.edu>
Subject: [PLS] May 13: Kate Follette (Amherst College)

Hello everyone,

We're excited to announce that our last speaker for the spring Planetary Lunch Seminar will be Prof. Kate Follette<https://www.follettelab.com/> from Amherst College in Western Mass. The seminar will be held next week on Tuesday, May 13th at 12:30 PM in 54-517, but we encourage you to arrive a bit early to get lunch. There will also be the option to attend virtually. The talk title, abstract, and Zoom information are provided below.

Kate has some availability for one-on-one meetings; please sign up for a meeting here<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1opusztAuro4l7e9mRvz29QDNd5UeRgibB-Q5zCPzlSU/edit?usp=sharing>.

We hope to see you there!

Best,
Sammy, on behalf of the PLS Organizing Committee

--------------------------------

Title
Too Big to Form: Accreting Planetary Mass Companions as a Key Piece of the Planet Formation Puzzle

Abstract
We are entering an exciting era where it is possible to directly constrain the formation pathways of giant planets by imaging planetary systems still in the act of forming from their circumstellar environment. Breadcrumbs of formation physics are sprinkled amidst detection and characterization studies of forming protoplanets and young brown dwarf companions (so-called "Planetary Mass Companions", or PMCs), as well as high-contrast imaging studies of circumstellar and circumplanetary disks. In this talk, I will describe my group's efforts to find and characterize accreting planets, paying particular attention to the open questions inherent in the process of translating observed object properties (e.g. contrast at an accretion-tracing wavelength) to physically-meaningful ones (e.g. mass accretion rate).  I will present recent ground and space-based multiwavelength observational efforts, as well as simulation and metaanalysis efforts, that share the broad goal of informing the properties of PMCs on a population-level. They speak strongly to the promise of JWST for disentangling the various hypothesized formation pathways for these puzzling super-massive planetary companions.

Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97275591700
Password: 54100


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