Taylor Kutra

University of Toronto

Taylor is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on how the protoplanetary disk can affect the planets that eventually form. Taylor hails from the west coast of Canada and did her Bachelors degree at Quest University. After her defence this summer, she will be continuing this work as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lowell Observatory.

Of all the areas of astrophysics, the scales involved in forming planets span the most orders of magnitude. One of the biggest outstanding questions in astrophysics is how planet formation proceeds. Everything from sub-micron dust grains that are responsible for passively heating a protoplanetary disk, to centimetre sized pebbles which accrete to form planets, and gaps and rings in protoplanetary disks that are tens of AU in diameter, can effect the planets that eventually form.

Her doctoral thesis focuses on a particular aspect of this process, namely simulating a starlight-driven instability in protoplanetary disks. For most of a protoplanetary disk, stellar illumination is the dominant heat source which provides pressure support. Pressure shapes the disk’s vertical structure, which in turn determines the amount of heating the disk receives from the star. However, most disk models do not treat this process self-consistently. Recent works have attempted to bridge this gap using simplified models. These suggest that temperature fluctuations in the disk may grow into order-unity thermal waves that significantly impact its evolution. Taylor’s hydrodynamical simulations capture, simultaneously, the stellar illumination and the disk’s hydrodynamical responses.

Evolution of the irradiation instability for protoplanetary disks. Initially, the disk is in thermal disequilibrium between cooling from the midplane and heating from stellar irradiation due to a shadow cast by the inner disk edge (bottom row). This perturbation causes a cascade of thermal peaks (middle row) and overdense rings (top row) as well as a corrugated optical surface (overplotted white line). These features are long lived in a hydrodynamic disk.