Random Snippets from PPV: Part I

Better late than never, here's a few things that caught my attention at the Protostars and Planets V meeting.

1) There's a lot of new Spitzer data. It is very interesting.
There is a lot of cataloging, compiling of averages, distributions and looking for outliers.
Big picture has not settled down.
Theory has completely fallen behind and my sense is people can't actually keep up with the news, just not enough manpower and the reviews are not out yet.

2) Disk gas goes away very quickly, in less than ~ 3 Myrs in many cases.

3) The transition from primordial dusty gas disks to cold gas free debris disks is very abrupt.
Warm dust disks are rare. The ones seen may be transition objects, or they may be transient due to rare impact events at late times.

4) The discrepancy between observed planet formation time scales and theoretical formation time scales is becoming significant. Planets seem to form more rapidly than predicted by current models.
This suggests the models are wrong, in that something is missing. I suspect relatively minor additional physics, but a lot of detailed process tracking, will close the discrepance.

Hey: google "Spitzer news" - Spitzer Space Telescope outranks Eliot Spitzer! Cool.