β Scribed by Vince Mannings; Alan Boss; Sara Russell
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Studies of the formation of planetesimals and planets have advanced tremendously during the past decade. In addition to benefiting from the magnificent discovery of giant planets orbiting nearby main-sequence stars, planet formation studies have been boosted by great progress in observations and modeling of protoplanetary disks, together with increasingly sophisticated examination of meteorite specimens.
The papers in the present issue arose from "Protostars and Planets IV" (PPIV), a meeting of 500 astronomers and meteoriticists from 27 nations at the University of California, Santa Barbara in July 1998. PPIV included many presentations on our current understanding of molecular clouds, star formation, circumstellar matter, jets and outflows, brown dwarfs, extrasolar planets, the Kuiper Belt, and planet formation. All of these topics will be reviewed in the PPIV book, to be published in 2000 by the University of Arizona Press. We are very grateful to Icarus Editor Philip Nicholson for compiling a superb collection of research papers related to circumstellar matter and planet formation, and we extend a special thanks to all authors for working hard to contribute to this issue.
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