Final Announcement

Meeting Location and Date

Accretion:  Building New Worlds Conference will be held August 15–18, 2017 at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, which is housed in the USRA building at 3600 Bay Area Boulevard, Houston, Texas 77058.

Limited parking is available at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, so conference participants are asked to car pool from their hotels. A rideshare bulletin board has been provided for you to communicate with other attendees for this purpose. (Note that the bulletin board is located within the Meeting Portal, so users will need to log into the Portal in order to view the available listings or post a message.) Parking will only be available on a first-come, first-served basis. Additional parking is available at the University Baptist Church parking lot. Attendees are welcome to park there and ride together to the LPI.

Purpose and Scope

Accretion:  Building New Worlds is the first topical conference of LPI’s The First Billion Years initiative. The conference will focus on processes of star formation and of circumstellar disks that lead to planetary systems, like our own, with planetary bodies, both silicate-rich and volatile-rich. These planetary bodies and their subsequent evolutions provide the bases for habitable environments and for the origin of life as we know it. The goal of this topical conference is to integrate the disparate stories of planetary accretion, both physical and chemical, into a consistent (although understandably incomplete) whole.

The Accretion conference will encompass the formation and aggregation of dust and gas to embryos to planets, and include astronomical observations of circumstellar disks, chemical and physical data from the solar system materials (meteorites, etc.), and simulations of physical and chemical processes of accretion. All relevant data and ideas are welcome.