What is the potential for survival and adaptation beyond the home planet?
Question 1: How do habitable worlds form and how do they evolve? Goal 1.1: Determine how stars and planetary systems form and understand what parameters determine the properties of the resulting systems. The Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the coupled formation of stars and planetary systems has been spectacularly verified by a wealth of observations in the last few decades. Observations of star-forming regions have been able to identify examples of nearly every stage in the star formation process: precollapse dense molecular cloud cores, young protostars surrounded by infalling molecular cloud gas and dust, and pre-main-sequence stars newly emerged from their placental cloud cores. Both protostars and pre-main-sequence stars exhibit a variety of evidence for the presence of the protoplanetary disks long predicted by theory to be the sites of planet formation. While protoplanets have not yet been detected within these disks, the discovery of a number of likely gas giant planets in orbit aro
