Data: 07.11.2023

Nuria Miret Roig (Vienna University)

The origin of free-floating planets

Streszczenie:
Free-floating planets (FFPs) are the lightest products of star formation and carry important information on the initial conditions of the environment in which they were formed. More than 20 years after their discovery, only a few samples have been detected and spectroscopically confirmed and many questions regarding their origin remain open. Do they form from the collapse and contraction of a tiny molecular clump, similar to low-mass stars? Or, were they born in planetary systems that later abandon? To answer these questions accurate measurements of their age, mass function, disc fraction and multiplicity are crucial. I will review recent results on the discovery and characterisation of FFPs and I will discuss how modern facilities like the JWST and ALMA will constitute a new step further in the detection and characterisation of FFPs.

Bio:
I’m currently a postdoc at the University of Vienna, where I study star formation by combining data from the Gaia satellite data with ground-based spectroscopic observations. My main research interests are the demography, kinematics, and dating techniques of young clusters and associations. I did my PhD, COSMIC-DANCE: A comprehensive census of nearby star-forming regions, under the supervision of Prof. Hervé Bouy and Dr. Javier Olivares at the University of Bordeaux. The main result of the PhD thesis is the discovery of a large family of free-floating planets in Upper Scorpius and Ophiuchus (140pc, 3-10 Myr) and a complete initial mass function of this region, from high mass stars to free-floating planets.