Dr. Kaitlin Kratter -- Building a Solar System on the Computer

About this episode

Dr. Kaitlin Kratter discusses the formation of solar systems and the computational models used to understand this process.

How did our solar system form? More generally, how does any solar system form? We get some of our answers to these questions by looking at newly-forming planetary systems in the first million years of their lives. But getting a complete picture also requires a lot of theoretical work, understanding each stage of solar system formation, which often entails big computational models of the early solar system. Dr. Kaitlin Kratter is a leader in the practice of building these big models and using them to improve our understanding of how the planets first formed.

People in this episode

Host: Paul Duffell

Guest: Dr. Kaitlin Kratter

Topics covered

• solar system formation
• planetary systems
• computational models
• theoretical astrophysics
• planet formation

Keywords

• solar system
• planetary formation
• computational astrophysics
• theoretical models
• planetary systems

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