Collaborative Research: Making a Habitable Planet - The Evolution of the Volatile Inventory in Gas-Rich Planet-Forming Disks

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It is now clear that there is an abundance of planets in orbit around stars similar to our own Sun. This program seeks to understand how these planets are born and whether key elements needed to foster life, such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, are likely to be present at their birth. The focus will be on the early steps in the formation of an Earth-like planet by studying how molecules comprising these elements are incorporated into small, rocky bodies. This program will combine observations from world-class astronomical telescopes with state-of-the-art detailed computational models. This program will foster a greater understanding of how planets like our own are born. A central part of this effort is the training of the next generation of scientists with diverse backgrounds that represent the future of research and teaching.The collaborative effort merges the work of the Blake and Bergin groups. This enables observational explorations of gas emission from less than a few AU using Keck and beyond with ALMA, which can be interpreted using detailed theoretical models. They will generate several thousand physical/time-dependent chemical models spanning parameter space, and they will develop/implement prescriptions for planetesimal formation and ice sequestration. The abundance and emission predictions from this grid will elucidate the fate of key carriers/tracers of the C, H, O, and N elemental pools. This will enable the determination of observable, mass independent, signatures of planetesimal formation. The observational efforts will target sources sampling a range in age. This will be done in two tracks: (1) Using the Keck archive, the ALMA archive, new Keck spectro-astrometric data, the team's accepted ALMA Cycle 1 and 2 programs, plus new proposals for ALMA Cycle 3. They will compare these data to their theoretical grid to characterize the overall spatial distribution of key volatiles and their links to planet formation. Data sets already in hand are suitable to study disk chemistry in two sources. (2) The second is based on evidence that nitriles might be key organic tracers of hot gas that has conditions comparable to those expected 1 AU from a young star. They will use ALMA Cycle 2 data to characterize the origin of these organics in hot cores and provide to search for evidence of this evolutionary tracer in nearby disk systems.