Bertram Bitsch's homepage

PAMDORA

PAMDORA is my ERC starting grant and stands for Planetary Accretion and Migration in Discs OveR all Ages. With this grant I want to explore how different types of planets (e.g. terrestrial planets, super-Earths, gas giants) can form in their natal protoplanetary discs.

The goal is to utilise hydrodynamical and N-body simulations to simulate various aspects of the planetary growth process. In addition, I am running simulation that simulate the growth from planetary embryos of around 0.01 Earth masses to full grown gas giants including pebble, planetesimal and gas accretion while they undergo type-I and type-II migration in their protoplanetary discs.

The PAMDORA grant finances my own position as well as as one post-doctoral researcher and two PhD students here at the MPIA. If you are interested in joing my reserach team, take a look here.

RESEARCH TEAM

Dr. Jingyi Mah: Jingyi is a post-doc in my research group and her research focuses on N-body dynamics to study the composition of the terrestrial planets in our own solar system.

Dr. Gabriele Pichierri: Gabriele is the post-doc in my research group and his research focuses on N-body dynamics and the trapping of planets in resonance. Understanding how planets are trapped in resonances is an important piece of the puzzle to understand how systems of close-in super-Earths are formed.

Sofia Savvidou: Sofia is a Phd student in my research group. Her research focuses on the structure and evolution of protoplanetary discs, including the effects of full grain size distributions to study the thermal structure of protoplanetary discs.

Camille Bergez-Casalou: Camille is a Phd student in my research group. Her research focuses on the influence of gas accretion on the structure and evolution of protoplanetary discs and how multiple planets migrate through discs.

Leon Hühn: Leon was a Bachelor student in my research group and studies the formation and evolution of the Kepler-223 system. He has returned for his Master thesis and will study how planet formation influences the chemical abundances of stars.

Jonas Müller: Jonas was a Bachelor student in my research group and studied the influence of the water content on the thermal structure of protoplanetary discs. He has returned for his Master thesis and will investigate planet formation around M-dwarfs.

Henrik Knierim: Henrik was a Bachelor student, studying diverse aspects of planet formation via pebble accretion in the planet population synthesis framework. His Master thesis focuses on Ohmic dissipation in hot Jupiters, in collaboration with Dr. Konstantin Batygin.

Christian Zimmermann: Christian is a Master student in my group, who studies how water poor super-Earths can form in an N-body framework where planet growth is driven by pebble accretion.

Lena Chatziastros: Lena is a Bachelor student in my group and studies how outer giant planets influence the chemcial composition of inner sub-Neptunes.

Previous Team Members in Heidelberg

Nelson Ndugu: Nelson was a Phd student working at the University of Mbarara, Uganda, who I am supervising remotely. His work focuses on planet population synthesis simulations, where the planets grow by pebble accretion.

Aaron Schneider: Aaron was a Master student in my reserach group. His work focused on the formation of planets via the accretion of planetesimals, pebbles and gas to calculate the chemical composition of the planets, see here and here.

Romy Gabriel: Romy was a Bachelor student in my research group and studies the formation of wide orbit giant planets with N-body simulations

Vincent Mader: Vincent was a Bachelor student using 2D hydrodynamical simulations to study how eccentric orbits can influence the gas accretion rate of giant planets.

Thomas Baumann:Thomas was a Bachelor student, studying how the heating torque influences the final position and masses of planets in the pebble accretion scenario. His Bachelor thesis lead to a publication in A&A.