I use data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and ground-based observatories to investigate how new planets form around young stars. I am especially interested in understanding how the properties of the stars themselves influence the types of planets they can ultimately host. I hope my work will someday help us discover how frequently the conditions that lead to the formation of Earth-like planets occur in the Universe.
Young stars produce excess light at UV wavelengths, generated as they accrete material from circumstellar disks. The additional energy helps regulate the thermal structure and chemistry of the disks, by heating the gas, dust, and ice available to form new planets. Thanks to the Hubble Ultraviolet Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards Director's Discretionary Program (ULLYSES), we can now characterize these UV radiation fields as a function of stellar mass, age, and formation environment. My most recent papers on this topic are: Arulanantham et al. 2020, 2021, 2023.
The instruments onboard JWST are sensitive to infrared emission from warm circumstellar gas and dust, typically located close to the central stars. Icy material within the planet-forming disk midplanes is also observed, as the grains absorb infrared light. The tremendous advances in spectral and spatial resolution and detector sensitivity will allow us to measure disk chemical compositions in large samples for the first time. This work is currently ongoing, with new papers to come soon! You can read about the planet formation discoveries I made with infrared observations from Spitzer here: Arulanantham et al. 2016, 2017