Preliminaries -- Oral Presentation
What Spitzer is teaching us about star and planet formation
Lori Allen, SAO
The Spitzer Space Telescope is NASA's Great Observatory for
infrared exploration. I will give a brief update on the status of the mission
and an overview of Spitzer's capabilities with respect to star formation.
Recent results from Spitzer GO, Legacy, and GTO programs will be presented,
including observations of disks around very low mass stars and brown dwarfs, spatial distributions of young stars and protostars on
multi-parsec scales, evidence of dust evolution in the inner disks
of 3-10 million year old stars, and observations of extrasolar planets.
I will review the efforts of various groups to interpret the mid-infrared
colors of young stars, aided by comparison with state-of-the-art models
of accretion disks and protostellar envelopes.