Princeton University Thunch Talk

ALMA has spatially resolved dozens of protoplanetary discs, discovering widespread signatures of young massive planets. To translate these observations into quantitative measures of the system, such as disc and planet masses, one must perform expensive numerical simulations. To simplify these, a steady state approach is commonly used: the planet position is kept fixed, and a constant source of dust is introduced at the outer edge of the computational domain. Here we take the famous system -- HD163296 as an example to argue against this approach by demonstrating how planet and dust dynamics can rule out "good" steady-state models.