Name: Dejan Vinkovic
Institution: School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study

University of Washington

Astrolunch

Abstract:
Some of the most intriguing and still poorly understood astrophysical processes operate in the immediate vicinity (several AU) of young pre-main-sequence stars; e.g launching of bipolar jets, disk accretion onto the star, formation of terrestrial planets, disk winds and primitive meteorites. Understanding the protoplanetary disk structure is prerequisite for investigating these phenomena. However, despite recent advances in the near infrared interferometry, which can resolve these disk regions, theoretical interpretation of disk's observational signatures still remains a major challenge. One of the difficulties is the complexity of dust radiative transfer. I will demonstrate this by showing problems that disk models have in explaining the near infrared data. After that I will advocate a model of optically thin dusty outflow around the inner disk as a possible explanation for the near infrared data.