Mike Sitko - New Adventures in High Angular Resolution Astrophysics

Speaker: Mike Sitko, University of Cincinnati

Abstract: The discovery over the past two decades of thousands of planetary systems that do not look like our own begs the question "Why?". From planet-disk migration to the "Nice Model" and "Grand Tack", it appears that the planetary system architectures found today do not necessarily show how these systems looked in their youth. Today, high angular resolution astronomical techniques are the key to investigating the signposts of exoprotoplanet formation, and in some cases, the exoprotoplanets themselves. These include single-telescope adaptive optics coronagraphic imaging, multi-telescope interferometric observations, and non-redundant sparse aperture masking interferometry. Coming in as an "outsider" to the field high spatial resolution revolution, I will describe a few of the programs that I have wandered into over the past few years.