The Birth of Planets with Aleksandra Kuznetsova

How do you go about building a planet? To find out, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome computational astrophysicist Dr. Aleksandra Kuznetsova, a NHFP Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at The American Museum of Natural History.

As always, though, we start off with the day’s joyfully cool cosmic thing, the presence of both a mini-Neptune and an exo-Venus in the exoplanetary system GJ3929, each with very short orbits around their star. Aleksandra discusses planetary migration and how it’s possible to have as tightly packed solar systems as GJ3929.

For our first student question, Kevin asks, “How can you create an artificial magnetic field for a planet like Mars?” Aleksandra explains the importance of Earth’s geodynamo in creating our magnetic field, and how it results from our rotating core of molten conductive metal material. This being The LIUniverse, of course a discussion of the movie “The Core” ensues, along with deeper dives into the kinetic energy of Earth’s rotation what it might take to re-spin a planetary core.

And then we’re off and running with the subject that’s near and dear to Aleksandra, the simulation of planetary formation. You’ll hear about our attempts to observe the “embedded phase” of planetary system development and the challenges of observation prior to the JWST with terrestrial radio telescopes like ALMA and the ngVLA. It turns out that protoplanetary disks in the embedded phase are quite “messy!”

Our second question comes from one of our Patrons on Patreon, Cameron, who asks, “Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the universe to know itself,” but is there a stigma that makes this knowledge unattractive to people? How do we inspire more people to learn more?”

Aleksandra brings up the idea of using language or art to inspire awe and wonder in people. For instance, the art of Wassily Kandinsky. It turns out, not only is Composition 8 by the artist Chuck’s favorite piece of non-representational art, but Aleksandra shares what a natural science nerd Kandinsky was and how intrigued he was by early microscopy images, as evidenced by his painting Capricious Forms.

Before the episode wraps, Aleksandra, Chuck, and Allen bond about how much they loved the movie, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.

If you’d like to know more about Dr. Kuznetsova and her research, visit her website at https://www.astrokuznetsova.com/ or follow her on X (Twitter) @1auaway.

We hope you enjoy this episode of The LIUniverse, and, if you do, please support us on Patreon.

Credits for Images Used in this Episode:

– Artist’s impression of a protoplanetary disk – ESO/L. Calçada, CC BY 4.0

– Illustration of Earth’s magnetic field – NASA, public domain

– Diagram of Earth’s geodynamo – Andrew Z. Colvin, CC BY-SA 4.0

– Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Station in South Korea –핑크로즈, CC BY 2.0

– Radio telescopes in the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) – ESO/C. Pontoni, CC BY 4.0

– Radio telescopes in the ngVLA – CGP Grey, CC BY 2.0

– Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky – Wassily Kandinsky, 1923, Public Domain

– Capricious Forms by Wassily Kandinsky – Wassily Kandinsky, 1937, Public Domain