Astro Seminar: How do you make a solar system like ours?

Stars form by the collapse of a rotating cloud, leftover angular momentum collects to form a disc, then planets… no, no, and no! Observations have taught us that this is not how either star or planet formation works. Our own solar system already hints that things are not this simple. Spins do not align, dust must have melted past 1500K in violent accretion events, and the Kuiper Belt is sharply truncated at 47 au. The last 10 years of observations of protostellar discs around newborn stars have taught us that star and planet formation occur together, during the messy, turbulent chaos by which stars are born. I will try to present a high level overview of what we have learnt by combining models with high resolution imaging of protoplanetary discs, and how this helps to solve  some of the old mysteries in the solar system.