Scott Kenyon

I am a (primarily) theoretical astrophysicist who studies the formation and evolution of stars/planets, hypervelocity stars, and interacting binary systems. I wrote the book on Symbiotic Stars. With Lee Hartmann, I constructed flared disk models for newly-formed stars and showed that FU Orionis objects are accretion disks. With Jane Luu and Ben Bromley, I developed numerical simulations for the formation of planets and debris disks. Our calculations were the first to build Earth-mass planets out of ensembles of km-sized planetesimals and to demonstrate that debris disks are the remains of newly-formed planetary systems.