Academia Sinica Logo

Understanding planet formation is a major challenge in modern astrophysics. Planets form in protoplanetary disks orbiting around young stars. These disks are gas and dust residuals inherited from the parent clouds which form stars. It is only recently, with the advent of large mm/submm arrays such as ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array, Chile) and its precursors, in particular the IRAM (Institute of Radio Astronomy Millimetric) array (France), that this field has slowly emerged in the early nineties. In this talk, I will present how our understanding on planet formation has evolved in the last 30 years. For this purpose, after an introduction describing the context, I will focus on the observations and analyses of two emblematic objects: the young low-mass triple system GG Tauri and the young single HAe (2.4 Msun) star AB Auriga. Starting from unresolved images of their protoplanetary disks 30 years ago, I will show how we are now beginning to unveil their nascent planetary systems.