Scientific Rationale
The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers working in the fields
of planet, star and galaxy formation in order to address current issues in these fields.
These three different communities generally do not interact and will benefit from
such a common meeting. Indeed, even though addressing apparently quite different
topics, these fields share many common physical problems in the domains of, for instance,
hydrodynamics/turbulence, magnetic fields, nonequilibrium chemistry,
radiation-matter interaction, and use similar computational techniques for modeling
these processes. From the observational point of view, the same modern major
ground based and space based instruments (VLT, HST, Spitzer, etc...) are used in
these different fields, within similar wavelength domains. It thus seems important to
bring together part of the planetary, stellar and cosmological communities to share
their expertise and to address common physical and numerical issues underlying the
problems of the formation of planets, stars and galaxies in the present and in the
primordial universe.
Sharing knowledge and open problems in the understanding of
the formation of these structures in the universe will be the unifying theme of
the conference.
This general topic is particularly timely for defining major
explorations of the universe to be carried out in the next decade with HERSCHEL, ALMA, JWST, DARWIN/TPF
and other powerful new instruments.