Mari-Liis Aru: how UV radiation strips planet-forming disks.

An astrophysics seminar in Imperial College London's weekly series. Mari-Liis Aru talks about how UV radiation from massive stars in star clusters photoevaporates protoplanetary disks from outside, affecting their sizes, masses and survival. Using a spatially resolved dataset of proplyds in the Orion Nebula Cluster taken with VLT/MUSE, she presents efforts to identify signatures unique to external photoevaporation, including comparisons with low-mass star-forming regions, and discusses new tracers for researching proplyds.