The Department of Astronomy 2025-2026 Colloquium Series Presents:

"Listening to a raindrop: 20 years of water spectroscopy of planet-forming disks"

It is only 20 years that we have access to observe water in planet-forming regions around other stars, the places where exoplanets -including potentially habitable rocky planets- are forming. Two decades is just a blink of an eye, and samples are still limited to a few hundred disks in nearby star-forming regions. I will provide an overview of all the data and the discoveries that have been obtained so far, describe the revolution that JWST is currently providing, and look forward to what is coming next. In particular, I will discuss the current prospects to trace and locate regions and processes that are proposed as fundamental in planet formation, the “snowline” and water delivery by icy pebble migration through the disk. If there’s time, I will end the talk with a little surprise.