Lowell Observatory: Worlds Revealed Speaker Series – How to Build a Planet When You Have Two Suns

Planet formation is already a messy, complex process—and that’s in the “simple” case of a single star. But most stars don’t form alone.

The majority are born in multiple star systems, meaning that if we want to understand how planets form across the Galaxy, we need to figure out what happens when stars have companions. In this talk, Dr. Taylor Kutra explores how the presence of a second star—especially in young, close binary systems—complicates an already messy process. She’ll share insights from her recent work characterizing tiny, evolving circumstellar and circumbinary disks. These systems may be small, but they punch well above their weight in challenging our theories of how planets come to be.