Asmita Bhandare

The main aim of my work is to unravel the role of various physical mechanisms using a robust, self-consistent numerical treatment in order to investigate the multi-scale transition of a prestellar core to a star-disk system harboring planet(s). I explore combined effects of gas and dust dynamics during the early stages of star and protostellar disk formation with radiation magneto-hydrodynamic simulations.

A Lyon-Heidelberg-Duisburg-Torino* production presents "The birth of a protostellar disk around its nascent star". Our aim was to better understand the behaviour of the gas and dust components within an isolated collapsing pre-stellar core. The main take-away is that a very young disk is extremely dynamic and exhibits regions with complex hydrodynamical gas features. We find transient meridional flows, which act as dust traps and efficiently mix the well-coupled dust within the forming disk. A thermal pressure driven outflow is seen to transport the gas-dust mixture from sub-au regions surrounding the protostar to the outer parts and offers an efficient pathway for thermal reprocessing.
*This was a fun project with Benoît Commerçon, Guillaume Laibe (CRAL, ENS Lyon); Mario Flock, Thomas Henning (MPIA, Heidelberg); Rolf Kuiper, Gabriel-Dominique Marleau (Univ. Duisburg-Essen); Andrea Mignone (Univ. Torino).

My Ph.D. thesis focused on studying how stars are born via the gravitational collapse of dense cores in magnetized molecular clouds. I performed radiation hydrodynamic simulations using the PLUTO code as a tool, in order to understand the complex physical processes involved in the very early stages of star formation. A brief overview of my work can be found in this poster and a detailed thesis can be accessed here. This work was done at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) with my Ph.D. advisors Prof. Dr. Thomas Henning, Prof. Dr. Rolf Kuiper, and Dr. Christian Fendt. I was a member of the International Max Planck Research School for Astronomy and Cosmic Physics at the University of Heidelberg (IMPRS-HD).

The aim of my Master thesis was to study the fate of protoplanetary disks due to the influence of parabolic star-disk encounters for both coplanar as well as inclined prograde and retrograde cases. For different mass ratios between the perturber and the central star, the effects of varying periastron distances on the final disk size were considered and compared for the different encounter scenarios. We also applied this study to the outer solar system. A short summary of my work can be seen in this poster and a detailed thesis can be accessed here. This work was done at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Susanne Pfalzner.

As a part of my bachelor thesis, we observed two extrasolar planets, namely WASP-12 b & HAT-P-7 b, using the transit method. The project involved using the software package IRAF to perform transit detections using defocused photometry techniques and introduced imaging as a probing technique to study these distant planets. The transit data was obtained using the Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT), Hanle, Ladakh, India. A detailed thesis can be accessed here. This work was done at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, India under the guidance of Dr. Firoza Sutaria.