Wednesday, 13th June at 2.00pm @ the JAC

ABSTRACT: The advent of space-based coronagraphy and ground-based AO imaging has enabled astronomers to spatially resolve young protoplanetary and slightly older debris disks in exquisite detail. The motivation for spatially resolving these systems is clear. Morphological features such as clumps, spiral arms, warps, geometric offsets, and other asymmetries can be produced by dynamical interactions between young planetary bodies and disk material; hence, high contrast, high spatial resolution imaging provides one avenue to investigate the early evolution of exoplanetary systems and their host environments. In this talk, I will present multi-epoch HST ACS and STIS coronagraphic observations of a young Herbig Ae protoplanetary disk. I will outline several pieces of evidence which suggest that the scattered light disk is variable, and suggest that the observed behavior might be attributable to the variable inflation of the scale height of the inner disk wall, which results in variable self-shadowing of the outer disk.