This year’s speaker for Carnegie Evening will be DTM staff scientist Alan Boss. The lecture, to take place on May 6, is an annual event that coincides with the spring meeting of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Board of Trustees.

Boss’s talk, titled “The Search for New Solar Systems,” will explore the history, current status, and future plans for discovering planets outside the Solar System, with an emphasis on the techniques and telescopes involved. These discoveries have important implications for the formation mechanisms of planetary systems. Boss will describe his new theory for the formation of giant planets. He developed his hypothesis as an alternative to the conventional core accretion theory, which relies on the accretion of gas from the solar nebula by a core of solid material but is problematic for many reasons, including the amount of time required for the process to run to completion. Boss’s new theory focuses on the idea that the gas and dust of a planet-forming disk could form self-gravitating clumps or instabilities that would rapidly contract, forming giant planets on much shorter timescales and sidestepping other problems with core accretion. Using computer modeling, Boss found support for his disk instability theory, which is able to account for giant planet formation in even the shortest-lived planet-forming disks. Boss continues to work at DTM on exploring the implications of this new means of giant planet formation.

Boss, along with others at DTM, is working at the forefront of extrasolar planetary science to develop accurate models for the formation of planetary systems. Their efforts in turn assist those using powerful telescopes to search for such planets, “a search that will not be considered completely successful until the first extrasolar Earth is discovered,” according to Boss.

Boss's talk will be simultaneously webcast during the May 6 event. For more information about viewing the webcast please click here.