Professor of Astrophysics, Co-Director of the Institute of Astronomy Mark Wyatt

The aim of my research is to understand how planetary systems form and evolve. It involves both theoretical and observational studies of extrasolar planetary systems, as well as of our own solar system. The main strength of my research is in the development of models of the physical and dynamical evolution of circumstellar material and their application to the interpretation of circumstellar disk observations. Past highlights of my work include linking clumps seen Vega’s dust disk to resonant trapping by an unseen Neptune-like planet in this system (Wyatt 2003), the discovery of a spatially resolved Kuiper Belt around the star eta Corvi (Wyatt et al. 2005), and modeling disk collisional evolution showing that the rare systems with hot dust are undergoing transient events, perhaps akin to the solar system’s period of Late Heavy Bombardment (Wyatt et al. 2007a), although the debris disks of most stars are evolving in quasi steady-state (Wyatt et al. 2007b). I wrote a review of debris disk evolution for ARAA (Wyatt 2008), which is a good introduction to this topic.