Paola Andrea Pinilla Ortiz is a Colombian astrophysicist whose research concerns the accretion of interplanetary dust clouds into protoplanetary disks as part of the formation of exoplanets. Educated in Colombia and Germany, she works in England as associate professor in exoplanets at the University College London Department of Space & Climate Physics, affiliated with the university's Mullard Space Science Laboratory. [1]
Pinilla is originally from Bogotá, [2] [3] and was inspired to go into astronomy following the interest of her older brother, and by watching the television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage . [4]
As a student at the University of the Andes (Colombia), Pinilla earned a bachelor's degree in physics with a minor in mathematics in 2007 and a master's degree in physics in 2009. She went to Heidelberg University in Germany for doctoral study in physics, completing her Ph.D. there in 2013. Her dissertation, Testing models of dust evolution in protoplanetary disks with millimeter observations, was supervised by Cornelis P. Dullemond. [5]
After postdoctoral research at Leiden University in the Netherlands and as a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Arizona in the US, [5] [3] in 2018 she won a Sofia Kovalevskaya Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, funding her research for a five-year term as a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. [4] [6] She moved to her current position as associate professor at University College London in 2022. [5]
Pinilla was a 2024 recipient of the New Horizons in Physics Prize, jointly with her coauthors Laura M. Pérez, Nienke van der Marel, and Til Birnstiel, "for the prediction, discovery, and modeling of dust traps in young circumstellar disks, solving a long-standing problem in planet formation". [3] [7]
Planetesimals are solid objects thought to exist in protoplanetary disks and debris disks. Believed to have formed in the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago, they aid study of its formation.
The nebular hypothesis is the most widely accepted model in the field of cosmogony to explain the formation and evolution of the Solar System. It suggests the Solar System is formed from gas and dust orbiting the Sun which clumped up together to form the planets. The theory was developed by Immanuel Kant and published in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) and then modified in 1796 by Pierre Laplace. Originally applied to the Solar System, the process of planetary system formation is now thought to be at work throughout the universe. The widely accepted modern variant of the nebular theory is the solar nebular disk model (SNDM) or solar nebular model. It offered explanations for a variety of properties of the Solar System, including the nearly circular and coplanar orbits of the planets, and their motion in the same direction as the Sun's rotation. Some elements of the original nebular theory are echoed in modern theories of planetary formation, but most elements have been superseded.
A protoplanetary disk is a rotating circumstellar disc of dense gas and dust surrounding a young newly formed star, a T Tauri star, or Herbig Ae/Be star. The protoplanetary disk may not be considered an accretion disk; while the two are similar, an accretion disk is hotter and spins much faster. It is also found on black holes, not stars. This process should not be confused with the accretion process thought to build up the planets themselves. Externally illuminated photo-evaporating protoplanetary disks are called proplyds.
A protoplanet is a large planetary embryo that originated within a protoplanetary disk and has undergone internal melting to produce a differentiated interior. Protoplanets are thought to form out of kilometer-sized planetesimals that gravitationally perturb each other's orbits and collide, gradually coalescing into the dominant planets.
TW Hydrae is a T Tauri star approximately 196 light-years away in the constellation of Hydra. TW Hydrae is about 80% of the mass of the Sun, but is only about 5-10 million years old. The star appears to be accreting from a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas, oriented face-on to Earth, which has been resolved in images from the ALMA observatory. TW Hydrae is accompanied by about twenty other low-mass stars with similar ages and spatial motions, comprising the "TW Hydrae association" or TWA, one of the closest regions of recent "fossil" star-formation to the Sun.
A primary atmosphere is an atmosphere of a planet that forms by accretion of gaseous matter from the accretion disc of the planet's sun. Planets such as Jupiter and Saturn have primary atmospheres. Primary atmospheres are very thick compared to secondary atmospheres like the one found on Earth. The primary atmosphere was lost on the terrestrial planets due to a combination of surface temperature, mass of the atoms and escape velocity of the planet.
A debris disk, or debris disc, is a circumstellar disk of dust and debris in orbit around a star. Sometimes these disks contain prominent rings, as seen in the image of Fomalhaut on the right. Debris disks are found around stars with mature planetary systems, including at least one debris disk in orbit around an evolved neutron star. Debris disks can also be produced and maintained as the remnants of collisions between planetesimals, otherwise known as asteroids and comets.
Zoltán Balog is an astronomer with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. In 2006, while at the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, Balog's team was the first to observe the complete process of photoevaporation of a protoplanetary disk.
HD 100546, also known as KR Muscae, is a pre-main sequence star of spectral type B8 to A0 located 353 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Musca. The star is surrounded by a circumstellar disk from a distance of 0.2 to 4 AU, and again from 13 AU out to a few hundred AU, with evidence for a protoplanet forming at a distance of around 47 AU.
Thomas K. Henning is a German astrophysicist. He was a director at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy between 2001 and 2024. Henning is an expert in the field of star and planet formation.
Sarah Dodson-Robinson is an American astronomer known for her work on planet formation and an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware.
The Fred Hoyle Medal and Prize was established in 2008 by the Institute of Physics of London for distinguished contributions to astrophysics, gravitational physics or cosmology. The medal is named after astronomer Fred Hoyle who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. The medal is made of silver and accompanied by a prize and a certificate. The medal was awarded biennially from 2008 to 2016. It has been awarded annually since 2017.
PDS 70 is a very young T Tauri star in the constellation Centaurus. Located 370 light-years from Earth, it has a mass of 0.76 M☉ and is approximately 5.4 million years old. The star has a protoplanetary disk containing two nascent exoplanets, named PDS 70b and PDS 70c, which have been directly imaged by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. PDS 70b was the first confirmed protoplanet to be directly imaged.
Catherine Jane Clarke is a Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. In 2017 she became the first woman to be awarded the Eddington Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2022 she became the first female director of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
A circumplanetary disk is a torus, pancake or ring-shaped accumulation of matter composed of gas, dust, planetesimals, asteroids or collision fragments in orbit around a planet. They are reservoirs of material out of which moons may form. Such a disk can manifest itself in various ways.
Barbara Ercolano is an Italian astrophysicist known for her work on interstellar dust, star formation, and protoplanetary disks. She is the Professor for Theoretical Astrophysics in the University Observatory Munich at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Diana Valencia is a Colombian planetary scientist and astrophysicist. She is an associate professor of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Toronto, Scarborough, and of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto.
Ilaria Pascucci is an Italian-American astrophysicist and planetary scientist known for her research on exoplanets, protoplanets, the formation of planets, and protoplanetary disks, using a combination of theory, simulation, and observation. Pascucci is a professor and associate department head in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona.
Laura Pérez is an astronomer and assistant professor at the University of Chile. She researches the formation and evolution of planetary systems to understand how the solar system was formed. She is one of the winners of the 2024 New Horizons Prize in Physics Breakthrough Prize, for her research into dust traps in young star formation, giving insight into a long-standing mystery in planet formation.
Yanqin Wu is a theoretical astrophysicist whose research concerns planet formation, protoplanetary disks, the effects on planets of photoevaporation, orbital resonance, and planetary migration, and the classification and distribution of exoplanets. She has theorized that planetary collisions have culled initially-crowded systems until what remains is often on the edge of chaos, and used oscillations in the rings of Saturn to study the past history of the Solar System. Educated in China and the US, she has worked in England and Canada, where she is a professor in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics of the University of Toronto.
