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.