research questions

How does the star forming environment affect nascent planetary systems?

The collapse of interstellar dusty gaseous star-forming clouds with some rotation naturally produces circumstellar planet-forming disks  - the progenitors of planetary systems like our own Solar System. 

Studies of star cluster formation (Kuznetsova et al, 2019;2020) suggest that protostellar cores likely accrete material from local filamentary flows, such that the velocity coherent subtructures found in OMC-1 could be responsible for feeding young protostellar systems with streamers, like those identified in Per-Emb-2. Substructure in very young systems like IRS-63, all the way down to disk scales, further supports the idea that star and planet formation is a truly multi-scale process.


relevant paper: Kuznetsova et al., 2022 !

We present a model of infall as an anisotropic process to capture the filamentary and directional nature of accretion  streams.

We show that there is a dynamical regime where such infall can be expected to trigger the Rossby Wave Instability (RWI) -- readily producing a range of substructures (in the dust and the gas kinematics!) in young embedded systems while setting the stage for planet formation very early on in the disk's lifetime!