2025/05/02 by Megan Allen, Rossella Anania, Morten Andersen +50 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #High-pressure geophysics and materials #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · doi:10.33232/001c.137538
openalex publication_date 2025/05/02 · openalex created_date 2025/05/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the community studying the effect of ultraviolet radiation environment, predominantly set by OB stars, on protoplanetary disc evolution and planet formation. This is important because a significant fraction of planetary systems, potentially including our own, formed in close proximity to OB stars. This is a rapidly developing field, with a broad range of observations across many regions recently obtained or recently scheduled. In this paper, stimulated by a series of workshops on the topic, we take stock of the current and upcoming observations. We discuss how the community can build on this recent success with future observations to make progress in answering the big questions of the field, with the broad goal of disentangling how external photoevaporation contributes to shaping the observed (exo)planet population. Both existing and future instruments offer numerous opportunities to make progress towards this goal.