Speaker
Description
Much of our understanding of star and planet formation hinges on the accuracy of stellar masses and ages derived from pre-main sequence evolutionary track models. Consequently, errors in evolutionary track models could propagate through much of our understanding of star and planet formation. Moreover, there remain few constraints on pre-main sequence evolutionary tracks owing in large part to the lack of pre-main sequence stars with precisely measured masses. Fortunately, Keplerian rotation in protoplanetary disks provides an avenue towards directly measuring the masses of young stars, and therefore could provide large samples of well measured masses with which to constrain evolutionary tracks. I will present my efforts using radiative transfer forward modeling of ALMA spectral line observations, in conjunction with precise distance measurements from Gaia that are used to break the stellar mass-distance degeneracy, to directly measure pre-main sequence stellar masses with precisions as high as 2%. I will also present efforts to extend these methods to measure stellar masses for embedded protostars, where the traditional method of estimating masses from evolutionary tracks can be impossible, as well as an attempt to directly measure the mass of a young purported protoplanet.
