Stony Brook University
7:30 pm
ESS Building, Room 001
Friday, March 07, 2025
Forming the Moon and other Solar System satellites, and looking for exomoons
Prof. Phil Armitage
The Moon and the Solar System's many other natural satellites are among the most well-known and intensively studied astronomical objects. The existence of the Moon affects the habitability of the Earth, and the properties of satellites more generally provide key clues to events that took place at the dawn of the Solar System. Yet it is not obvious, or easy, to understand how they formed. In this talk, I will discuss what we do (and don't) know about the formation of satellite systems, and report on ongoing efforts to find the elusive population of exomoons - satellites orbiting extrasolar planets.
Phil Armitage is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, and a Senior Research Scientist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in Manhattan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1996, and was a Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, prior to joining Stony Brook in 2018. His research focuses on theoretical and computational studies of planet formation, and on the astrophysics of black holes.
