Carsten Dominik's research proposal title is Ground Truth for Pebbles in Planet Formation.

Understanding how planets form touches deeply on the question of the origin of the Earth and ultimately us. How did we get here? Thousands of extrasolar planets are now known, and the birth environments of planets, planet-forming disks around young stars, are now in plain view with the latest astronomical instrumentation. Our best understanding tells us that tiny dust particles, like grains of sand, must be colliding, stick together and grow, step by step. At first, they form smoke-like structures that then must be compacted in collisions into so-called Pebbles, compact millimeter to centimeter-sized particles. Once Pebbles are there, we know how to get to planets.  But can the Pebbles themselves be produced in sufficient quantity and with the right properties? That is not known.  This is the topic of the ERC Advanced Grant project GT4Pebbles, Ground-Truth for Pebbles. The project is a numerical modeling effort that analyzes how dust grains grow into large aggregates, how these aggregates can be compacted in collisions, and how we can identify this process in observations of planet-forming disks. So that is a lot of numerical simulations. But to anchor all of this with Ground Truth, I will build, in collaboration with my scientific Partner Prof. J. Blum at the Technical University in Braunschweig, a break-through laboratory experiment. A 2-meter diameter, 5 ton rotating vacuum chamber in which we will recreate the conditions in a planet-forming disk to see the process of growth and compaction happening live, while we measure the properties and observational signatures of the growing and compacting aggregates. In five year’s time, we hope to be able to provide planet formation models with detailed instructions on what kind of Pebbles they will be able to use to build entire planetary systems.